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[TALlANjOURNEYS

ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

VOL. I.

MR. W. D. HOWELLS' WORKS.

Pocket Edition, in One Shilling Tols.

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM, 2 vote.
A FOREGONE CONCLUSION.
A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE.
THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.
A COUNTERFEIT PRESENTMENT.
LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK. 2 vote.
OUT OF THE QUESTION.
UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. 2 vote.
A FEARFUL RESPONSIBILITY.
VENETIAN LIFE. 2 vols.
ITALIAN JOURNEYS. 2 vols.

EDINBURGH: DAVID DOUGLAS.
LONDON : HAMILTON. ADAMS & Co.

ITALIAN
JOURNEYS

BY

WILLIAM D. HOWELLS

Anthor's Edition

VOL. I.

EDINBURGH

DAVID DOUGLAS, CASTLE STREET
1887

427

V-

tSnibersitg iprcga :

T. AND A. CONSTABLE, PRINTERS TO HER MA JEST

CONTENTS.

THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE—

I. LEAVING VENICE, .... 7

II. FROM PADUA TO FERRARA, . . 9

III. THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE,

AND THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA, 14

IV. THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA, . 50
V. UP AND DOWN GENOA, . . .60

VI. BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES, . 77

VII. CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES, . . 89

VIII. A DAT IN POMPEII, .... 106

IX. A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM, . 127

X. CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES, . . . 140

XI. THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS

AT NAPLES, 165

XII. BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES, . . 178
XIII. ROMAN PEARLS, . . . .184

FORZA MAGGIORE, 218

AT PADUA, . . 241

THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE.

LEAVING VENICE.

*1"1TE did not know, when we started from
? V home in Venice, on the 8th of Nov-
ember 1864, that we had taken the longest
road to Rome. We thought that of all the
proverbial paths to the Eternal City that
leading to Padua, and thence through
Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so
down the sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita
Vecchia, was the best, the briefest, and the
cheapest. Who could have dreamed that
this path, so wisely and carefully chosen,
would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on ship-
board, toss us four dizzy days and nights,
and set us down, void, battered, and be-
wildered, in Naples ? Luckily,

" The moving accident is not my trade, '
for there are events of this journey (now

8 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

happily at an end) which, if I recounted
them with unsparing sincerity, would for
ever deter the reader from taking any road
to Rome.

Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all,
when you come to it ?

FROM PADUA TO FERRARA.

II.

FROM PADUA TO FERRARA.

AS far as to Ferrara there was no sign of
deviation from the direct line in our
road, and the company was well enough.
\Ye had a Swiss family in the car with us to
Padua, antt they told us how they were
going home to their mountains from Russia,
where they had spent nineteen years of their
lives. They were mother and father and
only daughter, and the last, without ever
having seen her ancestral country, was so
Swiss in her yet childish beauty, that she
filled the morning twilight with vague im-
ages of glacial height, blue lake, snug chalet,
and whatever else of picturesque there is
in paint and print about Switzerland. Of
course, as the light grew brighter these im-
ages melted away, and left only a little frost
upon the window-pane.

The mother was restively anxious at near-
ing her country, and told us everything of
its loveliness and happiness. Nineteen years
of absence had not robbed it of the poorest

10 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

charm, and I hope that seeing it again took
nothing from it. We said how glad we
should be if we were as near America as
she was to Switzerland. "America!" she
screamed ; "you come from America ! Dear
God, the world is wide — the world is wide ! "
The thought was so paralysing that it si-
lenced the fat little lady for a moment, and
gave her husband time to express his sym-
pathy with us in our war, which he under-
stood perfectly well. He trusted that the
revolution to perpetuate slavery must fail,
and he hoped that the war would soon end,
for it made cotton very dear.

Europe is material : I doubt if, after
Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there were
many upon that continent whose enthusiasm
for American unity (which is European free-
dom) was not somewhat chilled by the expen-
siveness of cotton. The fabrics were all
doubled in price, and every man in Europe
paid tribute in hard money to the devotion
with which we prosecuted the war, and, in-
cidentally, interrupted the cultivation of
cotton.

We shook hands with our friends, and
dismounted at Padua, where we were to take
the diligence for the Po. In the diligence
their loss was more than made good by the

ROM PADUA TO FERRARA. 11

company of the only honest man in Italy.
Of course this honest man had been a great
sufferer from his own countrymen, and I wish
that all English and American tourists, who
think themselves the sole victims of publican
rapacity and deceit in Italy, could have heard
our honest man's talk. The truth is, these
ingenious people prey upon their own kind
with an avidity quite as keen as that with
which they devour strangers ; and I am half-
ptrsuaded that a ready-witted foreigner fares
better among them than a traveller of their
own nation. Italians will always pretend,
on any occasion, that you have been plun-
dered much worse than they, but the reverse
often happens. They give little in fees ;
but their landlord, their porter, their driver,
and their boatmen pillage them with the
same impunity that they rob an Inglese.
As for this honest man in the diligence, he
had suffered such enormities at the hands of
the Paduans, from which we had just escaped,
and at the hands of the Ferrarese, into which
we were rushing (at the rate of five miles
scant an hour), that I was almost minded to
stop between the nests of those brigands and
pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the
honest man lived. His talk was amusingly
instructive, and went to illustrate the strong

12 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

municipal spirit which still dominates all
Italy, and which is more inimical to an
effectual unity among Italians than Pope or
Kaiser has ever been. Our honest man of
Rovigo was a, foreigner at Padua, twenty -five
miles north, and a foreigner at Ferrara,
twenty -five miles south ; and throughout
Italy the native of one city is an alien in
another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or
an American with people who consider every
stranger as sent them by the bounty of Pro-
vidence to be eaten alive. Heaven knows
what our honest man had paid at his hotel
in Padua, but in Ferrara the other week he
had been made to give five francs a piece for
two small roast chickens, besides a fee to the
waiter ; and he pathetically warned us to
beware how we dealt with Italians. Indeed,
I never met a man so thoroughly persuaded
of the rascality of his nation and of his own
exceptional virtue. He took snuff with his
whole person ; and he volunteered, at sight
of a flock of geese, a recipe which I give the
reader : Stuff a goose with sausage ; let it
hang in the weather during the whiter ; and
in the spring cut it up and stew it, and you
have an excellent and delicate soup.

But after all, our friend's talk, though con-
stant, became dispiriting, and we were willing

FROM PADUA TO FERRARA. 13

when he left us.. His integrity had, indeed,
been so oppressive that I was glad to be
swindled in the charge for our dinner at the
Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more cheer-
fully on to Ferrara.

14 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

III.

THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND
THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA.

IT was one of the fatalities of travel, rather
than any real interest in the poet, which
led me to visit the prison of Tasso on the night
of our arrival, which was mild and moonlit.
The portier at the Stella d'Oro suggested the
sentimental homage to sorrows which it is
sometimes difficult to respect, and I went
and paid this homage in the coal-cellar in
which was never imprisoned the poet whose
works I had not read.

The famous hospital of St. Anna, where
Tasso was confined for seven years, is still
an asylum for the infirm and sick, but it is no
longer used as a mad-house. It stands on
one of the long, silent Ferrarese streets, not
far from the ducal castle, and it is said that
from the window of his cell the unhappy poet
could behold Leonora in her tower. It may
be so ; certainly those who can believe in the

FEKRARA. 15

genuineness of the cell will have no trouble
in believing that the vision of Tasso could
pierce through several brick walls and
a Doric portico, and at last comprehend
the lady at her casement in the castle.
We entered a modern gateway, and passed
into a hall of the elder edifice, where a
slim young soldier sat reading a romance of
Dumas. This was the keeper of Tasso's
prison ; and knowing me, by the instinct
which teaches an Italian custodian to dis-
tinguish his prey, for a seeker after the True
and Beautiful, he relinquished his romance,
lighted a waxen taper, unbolted a heavy
door with a dramatic clang, and preceded
me to the cell of Tasso. We descended a
little stairway, and found ourselves in a
sufficiently spacious court, which was still
ampler in the poet's time, and was then a
garden planted with trees and flowers. On
a low doorway to the right was inscribed
the legend " PRIGIOXE DI TASSO," and,
passing through this doorway into a kind
of reception-cell, we entered the poet's
dungeon. It is an oblong room, with a low
wagon-roof ceiling, under which it is barely
possible to stand upright. A single narrow
window admits the light, and the stone
casing of this window has a hollow in a

16 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

certain place, which might well have been
worn there by the friction of the hand that
for seven years passed the prisoner his food
through the small opening. The young
custodian pointed to this memento of suffer-
ing, without effusion, and he drew my
attention to other remarkable things in the
cell, without troubling himself to palliate
their improbability in the least. They were
his stock in trade ; you paid your money,
and took your choice of believing in them or
not. On the other hand, my portier, an ex-
valet de place, pumped a softly murmuring
stream of enthusiasm, and expressed the
freshest delight in the inspection of each
object of interest.

One still faintly discerns among the vast
number of names with which the walls of
the ante-cell are be- written, that of Lamar-
tine. The name of Byron, which was once
deeply graven in the stucco, had been
scooped away by the Grand Duke of Tuscany
(so the custodian said), and there is only
part of a capital B now visible. But the
cell itself is still fragrant of associations
with the noble bard, who, according to the
story related to Valery, caused himself to
be locked up in it, and there, with his head
fallen upon his breast, and frequently smit-

FERRARA. 17

ing his brow, spent two hours in pacing the
floor with great strides. It is a touching
picture ; but its pathos becomes somewhat
embarrassing when you enter the cell, and
see the impossibility of taking more than
three generous paces without turning.
When Byron issued forth, after his exercise,
he said (still according to Valery) to the
custodian : "I thank thee, good man ! The
thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind
and heart."

"A short time after his departure from
Ferrari," adds the Frenchman, maliciously,
"he composed his ' Lament of Tasso,' a
mediocre result from such inspiration." Xo
doubt all this is coloured, for the same author
adds another tint to heighten the absurdity
of the spectacle : he declares that Byron
spent part of his time in the cell in writing
upon the ceiling Lamartme's verses on Tasso,
which he misspelled. The present visitor
has no means of judging of the truth con-
cerning this, for the lines of the poet have
been so smoked by the candles of successive
pilgrims in their efforts to get light on them,
that they are now utterly illegible. But if
it is uncertain what were Byron's emotions
on visiting the prison of Tasso, there is no
doubt about Lady Morgan's: she "experi-

VOL. i. B

18 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

eiiced a suffocating emotion ; her heart failed
her on entering that cell ; and she satisfied
a melancholy curiosity at the cost of a most
painful sensation."

I find this amusing fact stated in a trans-
lation of her ladyship's own language, in
a clever guide-book called II Servitore di
Piazza, which I bought at Ferrara, and from
which, I confess, I have learnt all I know to
confirm me in my doubt of Tasso's prison.
The Count Avventi, who wrrites this book,
prefaces it by saying that he is a valet de place
who knows how to read and write, and he
employs these unusual gifts with singular
candour and clearness. No one, he says,
before the nineteenth century, ever dreamed
of calling the cellar in question Tasso's prison,
and it was never before that time made the
shrine of sentimental pilgrimage, though it
has since been visited by every traveller who
has passed though Ferrara. It was used
during the poet's time to hold charcoal and
lime ; and not long ago died an old servant
of the hospital, who remembered its use for
that purpose. It is damp, close, and dark,
and Count Avventi thinks it hardly possible
that a delicate courtier could have lived
seven years in a place unwholesome enough
to kill a stout labourer in two months ; while

FERKARA. 19

it seems to him not probable that Tasso
should have received there the visit of princes
and other distinguished persons whom Duke
Alfonso allowed to see him, or that a prisoner
who was often permitted to ride about the
city in a carriage should have been thrust
back into such a cavern on his return to the
hospital. "After this," says our valet de
place who knows how to read and write,
"visit the prison of Tasso, certain that in the
hospital of St. Anna that great man was con-
fined for many years ; " and, with this chilly
warning, leaves his reader to his emotions.

I am afraid that if as frank caution were
uttered in regard to other memorable
places, the objects of interest in Italy would
dwindle sadly in number, and the valets de
place, whether they know how to read and
write or not, would be starved to death.
Even the learning of Italy is poetic ; and an
Italian would rather enjoy a fiction than
know a fact — in which preference I am not
ready to pronounce him unwise. But this
characteristic of his embroiders the stranger's
progress throughout the whole land with
fanciful improbabilities ; so that if one use his
eyes half as much as his wonder, he must
see how much better it would have been to
visit, in fancy, scenes that have an interest

20 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

so largely imaginary. The utmost he can
make out of the most famous place is, that it
is possibly what it is said to be, and is more
probably as near that as anything local enter-
prise could furnish. He visits the very cell in
which Tasso was confined, and has the satis-
faction of knowing that it was the charcoal
cellar of the hospital in which the poet dwelt.
And the genius loci — where is that? Away in
the American woods, very likely, whispering
some dreamy, credulous youth, — telling him
charming fables of its locus, and proposing to
itself to abandon him as soon as he sets
foot upon its native ground. You see,
though I cared little about Tasso, and
nothing about his prison, I was heavily dis-
appointed in not being able to believe in it,
and felt somehow that I had been awakened
from a cherished dream.

BUT I have no right to cast the unbroken
shadow of my scepticism upon the reader,
and so I tell him a story about Ferrara
which I actually believe. He must know
that in Ferrara the streets are marvellous
long and straight. On the corners formed
by the crossing of two of the longest and
straightest of these streets stand four

FERRARA. 21

palaces, in only one of which we have a
present interest. This palace my guide took
me to see, after our visit to Tasso's prison,
and, standing in its shadow, he related to
me the occurrence which has given it a sad
celebrity. It was, in the time of the gifted
toxicologist, the residence of Lucrezia Borgia,
who used to make poisonous little suppers
there, and ask the best families of Italy to
partake of them. It happened on one occa-
sion that Lucrezia Borgia was thrust out of
a ballroom at Venice as a disreputable char-
acter, and treated with peculiar indignity.
She determined to make the Venetians re-
pent their unwonted accession of virtue, and
she therefore allowed the occurrence to be
forgotten till the proper moment of her
revenge arrived, when she gave a supper,
and invited to her board eighteen young and
handsome Venetian nobles. Upon the pre-
paration of this repast she bestowed all the
resources of her skilful and exquisite know-
ledge ; and the result was, the Venetians
were so felicitously poisoned that they had
just time to listen to a speech from the
charming and ingenious lady of the house
before expiring. In this address she re-
minded her guests of the occurrence in the
Venetian ball-room, and perhaps exulted a

22 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

little tediously in her present vengeance.
She was surprised and pained when one of
the guests interrupted her, and, justifying
the treatment she had received at Venice,
declared himself her natural son. The lady
instantly recognised him, and in the sudden
revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to
take an antidote. This he not only refused
to do, but continued his dying reproaches,
till his mother, losing her self-command,
drew her poniard and plunged it into his
heart.

The blood of her son fell upon the table-
cloth, and this being hung out of the window
to dry, the wall received a stain, which
neither the sun nor rain of centuries sufficed
to efface, and which was only removed with
the masonry, when it became necessary to
restore the wall under the window, a few
months before the time of my visit to Ferrara.
Accordingly the blood-stain has now disap-
peared ; but the conscientious artist who
painted the new wall has faithfully restored
the tragic spot, by bestowing upon the stucco
a bloody dash of Venetian red.'

in.

IT would be pleasant and merciful, I
think, if old towns, after having served a

FERRARA. 23

certain number of centuries for the use and
pride of men, could be released to a gentle,
unmolested decay. I, for my part, would
like to have the ducal cities of North Italy,
such as Mantua, Modena, Parma, and Ferrara,
locked up quietly within their walls, and left
to crumble and totter and fall, without any
harder presence to vex them in their de-
crepitude than that of some grey custodian,
who should come to the gate with clanking
keys, and admit the wandering stranger if he
gave stgns of a reverent sympathy, to look for
a little while upon the reserved and dignified
desolation. It is a shame to tempt these sad
old cities into unnatural activity, when they
long ago made their peace with the world,
and would fain be mixing their weary brick
and mortar with the earth's unbuilded dust ;
and it is hard for the emotional traveller
to restrain his sense of outrage at finding
them inhabited, and their rest broken by
sounds of toil, traffic, and idleness ; at seeing
places that would gladly have had done with
history still doomed to be parts of political
systems, to read the newspapers, and to ex-
pose railway guides and caricatures of the
Pope and of Napoleon in their shop windows.
Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated
into a living nation against her will, and I

24 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

therefore marvelled the more that she had
become a portion of the present kingdom of
Italy. The poor little state had its day
long before ours ; it had been a republic, and
then subject to lords ; and then, its lords be-
coming dukes, it had led a life of gaiety and
glory till its fall, and given the world such
names and memories as had fairly won it the
right to rest for ever from making history.
Its individual existence ended with that of
Alfonso ii., in 1597, when the Pope declared
it reverted to the Holy See ; and I always
fancied that it must have received with a
spectral, yet courtly, kind of surprise, those
rights of man which bloody-handed France
distributed to the Italian cities in 1796 ; that
it must have experienced a ghostly bewilder-
ment in its rapid transformation, thereafter,
under Napoleon, into part of the Cispadan
Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the Italian
Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and
that it must have sunk back again under the
rule of the Popes with gratitude and relief at
last — as phantoms are reputed to be glad
when released from haunting the world
where they once dwelt. I speak of all this,
not so much from actual knowledge of facts
as from personal feeling ; for it seems to me
that if I were a city of the past, and must be

FKKUAKA. 25

inhabited at all, I should choose just such
priestly domination, assured that though it
consumed my substance, yet it would be
well for my fame and final repose. I should
like to feel that my old churches were safe
from demolition ; that my old convents and
monasteries should always shelter the pious
indolence of friars and nuns. It would be
pleasant to have studious monks exploring
quaint corners of my unphilosophised annals,
and gentle, snuff- taking abbes writing up epi-
sodes in the history of my noble families, and
dedicating them to the present heirs of past
renown ; while the thinker and the reviewer
should never penetrate my archives. Being
myself done with war, I should be glad to
have my people exempt, as they are under
the Pope, from military service ; and I should
hope that if the legates taxed them, the taxes
paid would be as so many masses said to get
my soul out of the purgatory of perished capi-
tals. Finally, I should trust that in the sanc-
tified keeping of the legates my mortal part
would rest as sweetly as bones laid in hallowed
earth brought from Jerusalem; and that under
their serene protection I should be for ever
secure from being in any way exhumed and
utilised by the ruthless hand of Progress.
However, as I said, this is a mere personal

26 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

preference, and other old cities might feel
differently. Indeed, though disposed to
condole with Ferrara upon the fact of her
having become part of modern Italy, I could
not deny, on better acquaintance with her,
that she was still almost entirely of the past.
She has certainly missed that ideal perfection
of non-existence under the Popes which I
have just depicted, but she is practically
almost as profoundly at rest under the King
of Italy. One may walk long through the
longitude and rectitude of many of her
streets without the encounter of a single
face : the place, as a whole, is by no means
as lively as Pompeii, where there are always
strangers ; perhaps the only cities in the world
worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of
agreeable solitude are Mantua and Hercula-
neum. It is the newer part of the town — the
modern quarter built before Boston was set-
tled or Ohio was known — which is loneliest;
and whatever motion and cheerfulness are
still felt in Ferrara linger fondly about the
ancient holds of life — about the street before
the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and
narrower streets branching away from the
piazza of the Duomo, where, on market
days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In
the Ghetto we were almost crowded, and

FERBABA. 27

people wanted to sell us things,with an enter-
prise that contrasted strangely with shop-
keeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed, surprise
at the presence of strangers spending two
days in Ferrara, when they could have got
away sooner, was the only emotion which
the whole population agreed in expressing
with any degree of energy, but into this
they seemed to throw their whole vitality.
The Italians are everywhere an artless race,
so far as concerns the gratification of their
curiosity, from which no consideration of
decency deters them. Here in Ferrara they
turned about and followed us with their eyes,
came to windows to see us, lay in wait for
us at street corners, and openly and audibly
debated whether we were English or German.
We might have thought this interest a
tribute to something peculiar in our dress or
manner, had it not visibly attended other
strangers who arrived with us. It rose
almost into a frenzy of craving to know
more of us all, when, on the third day, the
whole city assembled before our hotel, and
witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry, the
departure of the heavy-laden omnibus which
bore us and our luggage from their midst.

28 ITALIAN JOUKNEY*.

IV.

I DOUBT if, after St. Mark's iu Venice,
the Duomo at Parma, and the Four Fabrics
at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be
seen for its quaint, rich architecture, than
the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is of that be-
loved Gothic, of which eye or soul cannot
weary, and we continually wandered back to
it from other more properly interesting ob-
jects. It is horribly restored in-doors, and its
Renaissance splendours soon drove us forth,
after we had looked at the Last Judgment by
Bastianino. The style of this painting is
muscular and Michelangelic, and the artist's
notion of putting his friends in heaven and
his foes in hell is by no means novel ; but
he has achieved fame for his picture by the
original thought of making it his revenge for
a disappointment in love. The unhappy
lady who refused his love is represented in
the depths, in the attitude of supplicating
the pity and interest of another maiden in
Paradise who accepted Bastianino, and
who consequently has no mercy on her
that snubbed him. But I counted of far
more value than this fresco the sincere old
sculptures on the facade of the cathedral, iu

FERRARA. 29

which the same subject is treated, beginning
from the moment the archangel's trump has
sounded. The people getting suddenly out of
their graves at the summons are all admirable,
but the best among them is the excellent
man with one leg over the side of his coffin,
tugging with both hands to pull himself up,
while the coffin-lid tumbles off behind. One
sees instantly that the conscience of this
early riser is clean, for he makes no miser-
able attempt to turn over for a nap of a few
thousand years more, with the pretence that
it was*not the tramp of doom, but some
other and unimportant noise he had heard.
The final reward of the blessed is expressed
by the repose of one small figure in the lap of
a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean
rest in Abraham's bosom ; but the artist has
bestowed far more interest and feeling upon
the fate of the damned, who are all boiling
in rows of immense pots. It is doubtful,
considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss
(as figured in the one small saint and the
large patriarch), whether the artist intended
the condition of his sinners to be so horribly
comic as it is ; but the effect is just as great,
for all that, and the slowest conscience
might well take alarm from the spectacle of
fate so grotesque and ludicrous j for, wit-

30 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

tiiigly or unwittingly, the artist here pun-
ishes, as Dante knew best how to do, the
folly of sinners as well as their wickedness.
Boiling is bad enough ; but to be boiled in an
undeniable dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton,
is to suffer shame as well as agony.

We turned from these horrors, and walked
down by the side of the Duomo toward the
Ghetto, which is not so foul as one could
wish a Ghetto to be. The Jews were ad-
mitted to Ferrara in 1275, and, throughout
the government of the dukes, were free
to live where they chose in the city ; but
the Pope's legate assigned them afterward
a separate quarter, which was closed with
gates. Large numbers of Spanish Jews fled
hither during the persecutions, and there are
four synagogues for the four languages, —
Spanish, German, French, and Italian.
Avventi mentions, among other interesting
facts concerning the Ferrarese Jews, that
one of their rabbins, Isaaco degli Abranelli,
a man of excellent learning in the Scriptures,
claimed to be descended from David. His
children still abide in Ferrara ; and it may
have been one of his kingly line that kept
the tempting antiquarian's shop on the
corner from which you turn up toward the
Library. I should think such a man would

FERKARA. 31

find a sort of melancholy solace in such a
place ; filled with broken and fragmentary
glories of every kind, it would serve him
for that chamber of desolation, set apart in
the houses of the Oriental Hebrews as a
place to bewail themselves in ; and, indeed,
this idea may go far to explain the universal
Israelitish fondness for dealing in relics and
ruins.

v.

THE Ghetto was in itself indifferent to
us ; it was merely our way to the Library,
whither the great memory of Ariosto invited
us to see his famous relics treasured there.

We found that the dead literati of Ferrara
had the place wholly to themselves ; not a
living soul disputed the solitude of the halls
with the custodians, and the bust of Ariosto
looked down from his monument upon rows
of empty tables, idle chairs, and dusty ink-
stands.

The poet, who was painted by Titian, has
a tomb of abandoned ugliness, and sleeps
under three epitaphs ; while cherubs frescoed
on the wall behind affect to disclose the
mausoleum, by lifting a frescoed curtain, but
deceive no one who cares to consider how
impossible it would be for them to perform
this service, and caper so ignobly as they do

32 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

at the same time. In fact, this tomb of
Ariosto shocks with its hideousness and
levity. It stood formerly in the Church
of San Benedetto, where it was erected
shortly after the poet's death, and it was
brought to the Library by the French,
when they turned the church into a barracks
for their troops. The poet's dust, therefore,
rests here, where the worm, working silently
through the vellum volumes on the shelves,
feeds upon the immortality of many other
poets. In the adjoining hall are the famed
and precious manuscripts of Ariosto and
of Tasso. A special application must be
made to the librarian, in order to see the
fragment of the Furioso in Ariosto's hand,
and the manuscript copy of the Gerusa-
lemma, with the corrections by Tasso.
There are some pages of Ariosto's Satires
framed and glazed for the satisfaction of the
less curious ; as well as a letter of Tasso's,
written from the Hospital of St. Anna, which
the poet sends to a friend, with twelve shirts,
and in which he begs that his friend will
have the shirts mended, and cautions him
"not to let them be mixed with others."
But when the slow custodian had at last
unlocked that more costly fragment of the
Furioso, and placed it in my hands, the

FERRAIIA. 33

other manuscripts had no value for me. It
seems to me that the one privilege which
travel has reserved to itself, is that of
making each traveller, in presence of its
treasures, forget whatever other travellers
have said or written about them. I had
read so much of Ariosto's industry, and
of the proof of it in this manuscript, that
I doubted if I should at last marvel at it.
But the wonder remains with the relic, and
I paid it my homage devoutly and humbly,
and was disconcerted afterward to read
again in my Valery how sensibly all others
had felt Hie preciousness of that famous
page, which, filled with half a score of pre-
vious failures, contains, in a little open space
near the margin, the poet's final triumph in
a clearly written stanza. Scarcely less
touching and interesting than Ariosto's
painful work on these yellow leaves, is the
grand and simple tribute which another
Italian poet was allowed to inscribe on one
of them : " Vittorio Alfieri beheld and
venerated;" and I think, counting over
the many mesnorable things I saw on the
road to Rome and the way home again,
this manuscript was the noblest thing and
best worthy to be remembered.

When at last I turned from it, however,
VOL. i. c

34 ITALIAX JOURNEYS.

I saw that the custodian had another relic of
Messer Lodovico, which he was not ashamed
to match with the manuscript in my interest.
This was the bone of one of the poet's fingers,
which the pious care of Ferrara had picked up
from his dust (when it was removed from the
church to the Library), and neatly bottled and
labelled. In like manner, they keep a great
deal of sanctity in bottles with the bones of
saints in Italy ; but I found very little savour
of poesy hanging about this literary relic.

As if the melancholy fragment of mortality
had marshalled us the way, we went from the
Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands
at the end of a long, long street, not far from
the railway station. There was not a
Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat, nor a dog
to be seen in all that long street, at high
noon, as we looked down its narrowing per-
spective, and if the poet and his friends
have ever a mind for a posthumous meeting
in his little reddish brick house, there is
nothing to prevent their assembly, in broad
daylight, from any part of the neighbour-
hood. There was no presence, however,
more spiritual than a comely country girl
to respond to our summons at the door, and
nothing but a tub of corn-meal disputed our
passage inside. Directly I found the house

FEKHARA. 35

inhabited by living people, I began to be
sorry that it was not as empty as the Library
and the street. Indeed, it is much better
with Petrarch's house at Arqua, where
the grandeur of the past is never molested
by the small household joys and troubles
of the present. That house is vacant, and
no eyes less tender and fond than the poet's
visitors may look down from its windows
over the slope of vines and olives which it
crowns ; and it seemed hard, here in Fer-
rara, where the houses are so many and the
people are so few, that Ariosto's house
could not IK left to him. ' ' Parva sed apta
mihi," he has contentedly written upon the
front ; but I doubt if he finds it large enough
for another family, though his modern
housekeeper reserves him certain rooms for
visitors. To gain these, you go up to the
second story — there are but two floors — and
cross to the rear of the building, where
Ariosto's chamber opens out of an anteroom,
and looks down upon a pinched and faded
bit of garden.1 In this chamber they say
1 In this garden the poet spent much of his time-
chiefly in plucking up and transplanting the unlucky
shrubbery, which was never suffered to grow three
months in the same place, — such was the poet's rage
for revision. It was probably never a very large or
splendid garden, for the reason that Ariosto gave when

36 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

the poet died. It is oblong, and not large.
I should think the windows and roof were
of the poet's time, and that everything
else had been restored ; I am quite sure
the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant
inventions : for the poet's burly great
arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both
preserved in the Library. But the house is
otherwise decent and probable ; and I do
not question but it was in the hall where
we encountered the meal -tub that the poet
kept a copy of his Furioso, subject to cor-
rections and advice of his visitors.

The ancestral house of the Ariosti has
been within a few years restored out of all
memory and semblance of itself ; and my
wish to see the place in which the poet was
born and spent his childhood resulted, after
infinite search, in finding a building faced
newly with stucco and newly French-win-
dowed.

Our portier said it was the work of the
late English Vice-Consul, who had bought
the house. When I complained of the sacri-

reproached that he who knew so well how to describe
magnificent palaces should have built such a poor
little house: "It was easier to make verses than
houses, and the fine palaces in his poem cost him no
money."

FERRARA. 37

lege, he said : "Yes, it is true. But then,
you must know, the Ariosti were not one of
the noble families of Ferrara."

VI.

THE castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about
which cluster so many sad and splendid
memories, stands in the heart of the city.
I think that the moonlight which, on the
night of arrival, showed me its massive
walls rising from the shadowy moat that
surrounds ^hem, and its four great towers,
heavily buttressed, and expanding at the top
into bulging cornices of cavernous brick-
work, could have fallen on nothing else in all
Italy so picturesque, and so full of the pro-
per dread charm of feudal times, as this pile
of gloomy and majestic strength. The
daylight took nothing of this charm from
it ; for the castle stands isolated in the
midst of the city, as its founder meant that
it should,1 and modern civilisation has not

1 The castle of Ferrara was begun in 1385 by
Niccol6 d'Este, to defend himself against the repeti-
tion of scenes of tumult, in which his princely rights
were invaded. One of his tax-gatherers, Tommaso da
Tortona, had, a short time before, made himself so
obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity,
that they rose against him and demanded his life. He

38 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

crossed the castle moat, to undignify its ex-
terior with any visible touch of the present.
To be sure, when you enter it, the magnifi-
cent life is gone out of the old edifice ; it is
no stately halberdier who stands on guard
at the gate of the drawbridge, but a stumpy
Italian soldier in baggy trousers. The castle
is full of public offices, and one sees in its
courts and on its stairways, not brilliant
men-at-arms, nor gay squires and pages, but
whistling messengers going from one office
to another with docketed papers, and slip-
shod serving-men carrying the clerks their
coffee in very dirty little pots. Dreary-
looking suitors, slowly grinding through
the mills of law, or passing in the routine of
the offices, are the guests encountered in
the corridors ; and all that bright-coloured
throng of the old days, ladies and lords, is

took refuge in the palace of his master, winch was
immediately assailed. The prince's own life was
threatened, and he was forced to surrender the fugitive
to the people, who tore Tortona limb from limb, and
then, after parading the city with the mutilated re-
mains, quietly returned to their allegiance. Niccolo,
therefore, caused this castle to be built, which he
strengthened with massive walls and towers com-
manding the whole city, and rendered inaccessible by
surrounding it with a deep and wide canal from the
river Reno.

FERRARA. 39

passed from the scene. The melodrama is
over, friends, and now we have a play of real
life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral.
Of course the custodians were slow to
admit any change of this kind. If you
could have believed them, — and the poor
people told as many lies as they could to
make you, — you would believe that nothing
had ever happened of a commonplace nature
in this castle. The taking-off of Hugo and
Parisina they think the great merit of the
castle ; and one of them, seeing us, made
haste to Jjght his taper and conduct us
down to the dungeons where those unhappy
lovers were imprisoned. It is the misfor-
tune of memorable dungeons to acquire,
when put upon show, just the reverse of
those properties which should raise horror
and distress in the mind of the beholder.
It was impossible to deny that the cells of
Parisina and of Hugo were both singularly
warm, dry, and comfortable ; and we, who
had never been imprisoned in them, found
it hard to command, for our sensation, the
terror and agony of the miserable ones who
suffered there. We, happy and secure in
these dungeons, could not think of the
guilty and wretched pair bowing themselves
to the headsman's stroke in the gloomy

40 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

chamber under the Hall of Aurora ; nor
of the Marquis, in his night-long walk,
breaking at last into frantic remorse and
tears to know that his will had been accom-
plished. Nay, there upon its very scene,
the whole tragedy faded from us ; and,
seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian
tried to kindle it by saying that in the time
of the event these cells were much dread-
fuller than now, which was no doubt true.
The floors of the dungeons are both below
the level of the moat, and the narrow win-
dows, or rather crevices to admit the light,
were cut in the prodigiously thick wall just
above the water, and were defended with
four successive iron gratings. The dungeons
are some distance apart: that of Hugo was
separated from the outer wall of the castle
by a narrow passage-way, while Parisina's
window opened directly upon the moat.

When we ascended again to the court of
the castle, the custodian, abetted by his wife,
would have interested us in two memorable
wells there, between which, he said, Hugo
was beheaded ; and, unabashed by the small
success of this fable, he pointed out two
windows, in converging angles overhead,
from one of which the Marquis, looking
into the other, discovered the guilt of the

FERRARA. 4 1

lovers. The windows are now walled up,
but are neatly represented to the credulous
eye by a fresco of lattices.

Valery mentions another claim upon the
interest of the tourist which this castle
may make, in the fact that it once sheltered
John Calvin, who was protected by the Mar-
chioness Renee, wife of Hercules n. ; and
my Servitore di Piazza (the one who knows
how to read and write) gives the following
account of the matter, in speaking of the
domestic chapel which Renee had built in
the castle :* ' ' This lady was learned in
belles-lettres and in the schismatic doctrines
which at that time were insinuating them-
selves throughout France and Germany,
and with which Calvin, Luther, and other
proselytes, agitated the people, and threat-
ened war to the Catholic religion. Nation-
ally fond of innovation, and averse to the
court of Rome on account of the dissensions
between her father and Pope Julius n.,
Renee began to receive the teachings of
Calvin, with whom she maintained corre-
spondence. Indeed, Calvin himself, under
the name of Huppeville, visited her in Fer-
rara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her
mind and seducing her into his own errors,
which produced discord between her and

42 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

her religious husband, and resulted in his
placing her in temporary seclusion, in order
to attempt her conversion. Hence, the
chapel is faced with marble, panelled in re-
lief, and studied to avoid giving place to
saints or images, which were disapproved by
the almost Anabaptist doctrines of Calvin,
then fatally imbibed by the princess."

We would willingly, as Protestants, have
visited this wicked chapel ; but we were
prevented from seeing it, as well as the
famous frescoes of Dosso Dossi in the Hall
of Aurora, by the fact that the prefect was
giving a little dinner (pranzetto) in that
part of the castle. We were not so greatly
disappointed in reality as we made believe ;
but our Servitore di piazza (the unlettered
one) was almost moved to lesa maestd with
vexation. He had been full of scorching
patriotism the whole morning; but now,
electing the unhappy and apologetic custo-
dian representative of Piedmontese tyranny,
he bitterly assailed the government of the
king. In the times of his Holiness the
legates had made it their pleasure and duty
to show the whole castle to strangers. But
now strangers must be sent away without
seeing its chief beauties, because, forsooth,
the prefect was giving a little dinner. Pre-
sence of the Devil !

43

VII.

IN our visits to the different churches in
Ferrara we noticed devotion in classes of
people who are devout nowhere else in
Italy. Not only came solid-looking business
men to say their prayers, but gay young
dandies, who knelt and repeated their ori-
sons, and then rose and went seriously out.
In Venice they would have posted them-
selves against a pillar, sucked the heads of
their sticks, and made eyes at the young
ladies kneeling near them. This degree of
religion waS all the more remarkable in
Ferrara, because that city had been so many
years under the Pope, and his Holiness
contrives commonly to prevent the appear-
ance of religion in young men throughout
his dominions.

Valery speaks of the delightful society
which he met in the grey old town ; and it
is said that Ferrara has an unusual share of
culture in her wealthy class, which is large.
With such memories of learning and liter-
ary splendour as belong to her, it would be
strange if she did not in some form keep
alive the sacred flame. But, though there may
be refinement and erudition in Ferrara, she
has given no great name to modern Italian

44 ITALIAN* JOURNEYS.

literature. Her men of letters seem to be
of that race of grubs singularly abundant
in Italy, — men who dig out of archives and
libraries some topic of special and momen-
tary interest and print it, unstudied and un-
philosophised. Their books are material,
not literature, and it is marvellous how
many of them are published. A writer on
any given subject can heap together from
them a mass of fact and anecdote invaluable
in its way ; but it is a mass without life or
light, and it must be vivified by him who
uses it before it can serve the world, which
does not care for its dead local value. It
remains to be seen whether the free speech
and free press of Italy can reawaken the in-
tellectual activity of the cities which once
gave the land so many literary capitals.

What numbers of people used to write
verses in Ferrara ! By operation of the
principle which causes things concerning
whatever subject you happen to be inter-
ested in to turn up in every direction, I
found a volume of these dead-and-gone im-
mortals at a book-stall, one day in Venice.
It is a curiously yellow and uncomfortable
volume of the year 1703, printed all in
italics. I suppose there are two hundred
odd rhymers selected from in that book, —

FERRARA. 45

and how droll the most of them are, with
their unmistakable traces of descent from
Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini ! What acres
of enamelled meadow there are in those
pages ! Brooks enough to turn all the mills
in the world go purling through them. I
should say some thousands of nymphs are
constantly engaged in weaving garlands
there, and the swains keep such a piping on
those familiar notes, — Amore, dolors, crudele,
and miele. Poor little poets ! they knew no
other tunes. Do not now weak voices twit-
ter from a hundred books, in unconscious
imitation of the hour's great singers ?

VIII.

I THINK some of the pleasantest people in
Italy are the army gentlemen. There is the
race's gentleness in their ways, in spite of
their ferocious trade, and an American free-
dom of style. They brag in a manner that
makes one feel at home immediately ; and,
met in travel, they are ready to render any
little kindness.

The other year at Reggio (which is not
far from Modena) we stopped to dine at a
restaurant where the whole garrison had its
coat off and was playing billiards, with the

46 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

exception of one or two officers, who were
dining. These rose and bowed as we
entered their room, and when the waiter
pretended that such and such dishes were
out (in Italy the waiter, for some mysterious
reason, always pretends that the best dishes
are out), they bullied him for the honour of
Italy, and made him bring them to us.
Indeed, I am afraid his life was sadly
harassed by those brave men. We were in
deep despair at finding no French bread,
and the waiter swore with the utmost pathos
that there was none ; but as soon as his back
was turned, a tightly laced little captain
rose and began to forage for the bread. He
opened every drawer and cupboard in the
room, and, finding none, invaded another
room, captured several loaves from the
plates laid there, and brought them back in
triumph, presenting them to us amid the
applause of his comrades. The dismay of
the waiter, on his return, was ineffable.

Three officers, who dined with us at the
table d'hdte of the Stella d'Oro in Ferrara
(and excellent dinners were those we ate
there), were visibly anxious to address us,
and began, not uncivilly, but still in order
that we should hear, to speculate on our
nationality among themselves. It appeared

FERRAKA. 47

that we were Germans ; for one of these
officers, who had formerly been in the
Austrian service at Vienna, recognised the
word bitter in our remarks on the beccafahi.
As I did not care to put these fine fellows to
the trouble of hating us for others' faults, I
made bold to say that we were not Germans,
and to add that bitter was also an English
word. Ah ! yes, to be sure, one of them
admitted ; when he was with the Sardinian
army in the Crimea, he had frequently
heard the word used by the English soldiers.
He nodded confirmation of what he said to
his comrades*; and then was good enough to
display what English he knew. It was
barely sufficient to impress his comrades ;
but it led the way to a good deal of talk in
Italian.

" I suppose you gentlemen are all Piecl-
montese?" I said.

"Not at all," said our Crimean. "I am
from Como ; this gentleman, il signer Conte
(il signer Conte bowed), is of Piacenza ; and
our friend across the table is Genoese. The
army is doing a great deal to unify Italy.
We are all Italians now, and you see we
speak Italian, and not our dialects, to-
gether."

My cheap remark that it was a fine thing

43 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

to see them all united under one flag, after
so many ages of mutual hate and bloodshed,
turned the talk upon the origin of the Ital-
ian flag ; and that led our Crimean to ask
what was the origin of the English colours.

"I scarcely know," I said. "We are
Americans."

Our friends at once grew more cordial.
"Oh, Americani !" They had great plea-
sure of it. Did we think Signor Leencolen
would be re-elected ?

I supposed that he had been elected that
day, I said.

Ah ! this was the election day, then.
Cospetto !

At this the Genoese frowned superior intel-
ligence, and the Crimean, gazing admiringly
upon him, said he had been nine months
at Nuova York, and that he had a brother
living there. The poor Crimean boastfully
added that he had a cousin in America, and
that Americans generally spoke Spanish. The
count from Piacenza wore an air of pathetic
discomfiture, and tried to invent a trans-
atlantic relative, as I think, but failed.

I am persuaded that none of these warriors
/ eally had kinsmen in America, but that they
all pretended to have them, out of politeness
to us, and that they believed each other.

FERRARA. 49

It was very kind of them, and we were so
grateful that we put no embarrassing ques-
tions. Indeed, the conversation presently
took another course, and grew to include
the whole table.

There was an extremely pretty Italian pre-
sent with her newly wedded husband, who
turned out to be a retired officer. He fra-
ternised at once with our soldiers, and when
we left the table they all rose and made
military obeisances. Having asked leave to
light their cigars, they were smoking — the
sweet young bride blowing a fairy cloud
from her rosy lips with the rest. " Indeed,"
I heard an Italian lady once remark, " why
should men pretend to deny us the privilege
of smoking, it is so pleasant and innocent ?"
It is but just to the Italians to say that they
do not always deny it ; and there is, with-
out doubt, a certain grace and charm in a
pretty fumatrice. I suppose it is a habit
not so pleasing in an ugly or middle-aged
woman.

VOL. I.

50 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

IV.

THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA.

WE had intended to stay only one day
at Ferrara, but just at that time the
storms predicted on the Adriatic and Medi-
terranean coasts, by Mathieu de la Drome,
had been raging all over Italy, and the rail-
way communications were broken in every
direction. The magnificent work through
and under the Apennines, between Bologna
and Florence, had been washed away by the
mountain torrents in a dozen places, and the
roads over the plains of the Romagna had
been sapped by the flood, and rendered use-
less where not actually laid under water.

On the day of our intended departure we
left the hotel, with other travellers, gaily
incredulous of the landlord's fear that no
train would start for Bologna. At the sta-
tion we found a crowd of people waiting
and hoping, but there was a sickly cast of
doubt in some faces, and the labelled em-
ploye's of the railway wore looks of ominous

THROUGH BOLOGXA TO GENOA. 51

importance. Of course the crowd did not
lose its temper. It sought information of
the officials running to and fro with tele-
grams, in a spirit of national sweetness, and
consoled itself with saying, as Italy has said
under all circumstances of difficulty for cen-
turies : Ci vuol pazienza ! At last a blank
silence fell upon it, as the Capo-Stazione ad-
vanced toward a well-dressed man in the
crowd, and spoke to him quietly. The well-
dressed man lifted his forefinger and waved
it back and forth before his face : —

The Well-dressed Man — Dunque, non si
parte piii ? (No departures, then ?)

The Capo-Stazione (waving his forefinger
in like manner) — Non si parte piu. (Like
a mournful echo. )

We knew quite as well from this pan-
tomime of negation as from the dialogue
our sad fate, and submitted to it. Some
adventurous spirit demanded whether any
trains would go on the morrow. The Capo-
Stazioiie, with an air of one who would not
presume to fathom the designs of Providence,
responded : " Who knows ? To-day, cer-
tainly not. To-morrow, perhaps. But " —
and vanished.

It may give an idea of the Italian way of
doing things to say that, as we understood,

52 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

this break in the line was only a few miles
in extent, that trains could have approached
both to and from Bologna, and that a little
enterprise on the part of the company could
have passed travellers from one side to the
other with very small trouble or delay. But
the railway company was as much daunted
by the inundation as a peasant going to mar-
ket, and for two months after the accident
no trains carried passengers from one city to
the other. No doubt, however, the line was
under process of very solid repair meanwhile.

For the present the only means of getting
to Bologna was by carriage on the old high-
way, and accordingly we took passage thither
in the omnibus of the Stella d'Oro.

There was little to interest us in the coun-
try over which we rode. It is perfectly flat,
and I suppose the reader knows what quan-
tities of hemp and flax are raised there. The
land seems poorer than in Lombardy, and
the farm-houses and peasants' cottages are
small and mean, though the peasants them-
selves, when we met them, looked well fed,
and were certainly well clad. The landscape
lay soaking in a dreary drizzle the whole
way, and the town of Cento, when we
reached it, seemed miserably conscious of
being too wet and dirty to go indoors, and

THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GEXOA. 53

was loitering about in the rain. Our arrival
gave the poor little place a sensation, for I
think such a thing as an omnibus had not
been seen there since the railway of Bologna
and Ferrara was built. We went into the
principal caffe to lunch — a caffe much too
large for Cento, with immense red-leather
cushioned sofas, and a cold, forlorn air of
half-starved gentility, a clean, high-roofed
caffe and a breezy, — and thither the youth-
ful nobility and gentry of the place followed
us, and ordered a cup of coffee, that they
might sit down and give us the pleasure of
their distinguished company. They put on
their very finest manners, and took their
most captivating attitudes for the ladies'
sake ; and the gentlemen of our party fancied
that it was for them these young men began
to discuss the Roman question. How loud
they were, and how earnest ! And how
often they consulted the newspapers of the
caffe ! (Older newspapers I never saw off a
canal boat.) I may tire some time of the
artless vanity of the young Italians, so in-
nocent, so amiable, so transparent, but I
think I never shall.

The great painter Guercino was born at
Cento, and they have a noble and beautiful
statue of him in the piazza, which the town

54 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

caused to be erected from contributions by
all the citizens. Formerly his house was
kept for a show to the public ; it was full of
the pictures of the painter and many me-
mentoes of him ; but recently the paintings
have been taken to the gallery, and the
house is now closed. The gallery is, conse-
quently, one of the richest second-rate
galleries in Italy, and one may spend much
longer time in it than we gave, with great
profit. There are some most interesting
heads of Christ, painted, as Guercino alwaya
painted the Saviour, with a great degree of
humanity in the face. It is an excellent
countenance, and full of sweet dignity, but
quite different from the conventional face of
Christ.

II.

AT night we were again in Bologna, of
which we had not seen the gloomy arcades
for two years. It must be a dreary town
at all times : in a rain it is horrible ; and
I think the whole race of arcaded cities,
Treviso, Padua, and Bologna, are dull, blind,
and comfortless. The effect of the buildings
vaulted above the side-walks is that of a
continuous cellar- way ; your view of the
street is constantly interrupted by the heavy

THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 55

brick pillars that support the arches ; the
arcades are not even picturesque. Liking
always to leave Bologna as quickly as pos-
sible, and, on this occasion, learning that
there was no hope of crossing the Apennines
to Florence, we made haste to take the first
train for Genoa, meaning to proceed thence
directly to Naples by steamer.

It was a motley company that sat down in
Hotel Brun the morning after our arrival
in Bologna to a breakfast of murky coffee
and furry beefsteaks, associated with sleek,
greasy, lukewarm fried potatoes. I am sure
that if each of our weather-bound pilgrims
had told his story, we had been as well en-
tertained as those at Canterbury. However,
no one thought fit to give his narrative but
a garrulous old Hebrew from London, who
told us how he had been made to pay fifteen
guineas for a carriage to cross the Apennines,
and had been obliged to walk part of the
way at that price. He was evidently proud,
now the money was gone, of having been
cheated of so much ; and in him we saw
that there was at least one human being
•more odious than a purse-proud Englishman
— namely, a purse-proud English Jew. He
gave his noble name after a while as some-
thing too precious to be kept from the com-

56 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

paiiy, when recommending one of the travel-
lers to go to the Hotel d'Angleterre in Rome :
"The best 'otel out of England. You may
mention my name, if you like — Mr Jonas."
The recipient of this favour noted down the
talismanic words in his pocket-book, and
Mr. Jonas, conscious of having conferred a
benefit on his race, became more odious to it
than ever. An Englishman is of a composi-
tion so uncomfortably original that no one
can copy hini, though many may caricature.
I saw an American in London once who
thought himself an Englishman because he
wore leg-of-mutton whiskers, declaimed
against universal suffrage and republics, and
had an appetite for high game. He was
a hateful animal, surely, but he was not the
British Lion ; and this poor Hebrew at
Bologna was not a whit more successful in
his imitation of the illustrious brute, though
he talked, like him, of nothing but hotels,
and routes of travel, and hackmen and por-
ters, and seemed to have nothing to do in
Italy but to get through it as quickly and
abusively as possible.

We were very glad, I say, to part from all
this at Bologna, and take the noon train for
Genoa. In our car there were none but
Italians, and the exchange of La Per sever-

THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 57

anza of Milan for II Popolo of Turin
with one of them quickly opened the way
for conversation and acquaintance. (En
passant: I know of no journal in the United
States whose articles are better than those
of the Perseveranza, and it was gratifying
to an American to read in this ablest journal
of Italy nothing but applause and encourage-
ment of the national side in our late war.)
My new-made friend turned out to be a
Milanese. He was a physician, and had
served as a surgeon in the late war of Ital-
ian independence ; but was now placed in a
hospital in Milan. There was a gentle little
blonde with him, and at Piacenza, where we
stopped for lunch, " You see," said he, indi-
cating the lady, " we are newly married "
— which was, indeed, plain enough to any
one who looked at their joyous faces, and
observed how great disposition that little
blonde had to nestle on that young man's
broad shoulder. " I have a week's leave
from my place," he went on, "and this is
our wedding journey. We were to have
gone to Florence, but it seems we are fated
not to see that famous city. "

He spoke of it as immensely far off, and
herein greatly amused us Americans, who
had outgrown distances.

58 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

"So we are going to Genoa instead, for
two or three days. " ' ' Oh, have you ever
been at Genoa ?" broke in the bride.
" What magnificent palaces ! And then the
bay, and the villas in the environs ! There is
the Villa Pallavicini, with beautiful gardens,
where an artificial shower breaks out from
the bushes, and sprinkles the people who
pass. Such fun !" and she continued to
describe vividly a city of which she had only
heard from her husband ; and it was easy to
see that she walked in paradise wherever he
led her.

They say that Italian husbands and wives
do not long remain fond of each other, but
it was impossible in the presence of these
happy people not to believe in the eternity
of their love, and it was hard to keep from
' ' dropping into poetry " on account of them.
Their bliss infected everybody in the car,
and in spite of the weariness of our journey,
and the vexation of the misadventures which
had succeeded one another unsparingly ever
since we left home, we found ourselves far
on the way to Genoa before we thought to
grumble at the distance. There was with
us, besides the bridal party, a lady travelling
from Bologna to Turin, who had learned
English in London, and spoke it much better

THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA. 51)

than most Londoners. It is surprising how
thoroughly Italians master a language so
alien to their own as ours, and how frequently
you find them acquainted with English.
From Russia the mania for this tongue has
spread all over the Continent, and in Italy
English seems to be prized first among the
virtues.

As we drew near Genoa, the moon came
out on purpose to show us the superb city,
and we strove eagerly for a first glimpse of
the proud capital where Columbus was bom.
To tell the truth, the glimpse was but slight
and false, for railways always enter cities by
some mean level, from which any picturesque
view is impossible.

Near the station in Genoa, however,
is the weak and ugly monument which the
municipality has lately raised to Columbus.
The moon made the best of this, which
stands in a wide open space, and contrived,
with an Italian skill in the arrangement of
light, to produce an effect of undeniable
splendour. On the morrow, we found out
by the careless candour of the daylight what
a uselessly big head Columbus had, and how
the sculptor had not very happily thought
proper to represent him with his sea-legs on.

60 ITALIAN' JOURNEYS.

V.
UP AND DOWN GENOA.

I HAD iny notebook with me on this jour-
ney, and pledged myself to make notes
hi it. And, indeed, I did really do some-
thing of the kind, though the result of my
labours is by no means so voluminous as I
would like it to be, now when the work of
wishing there were more notes is so easy.
We spent but one day in Genoa, and I find
such a marvellous succinct record of this in
my book that I am tempted to give it here,
after the fashion of that Historical Heavy-
weight who writes the Life, of Frederick the
Great.

" Genoa, November 13. — Breakfast a la
fourchette excellently and cheaply. I buy
a hat. We go to seek the Consul, and, after
finding everything else for two hours, find
him. Genoa is the most magnificent city I
ever saw; and the new monument to Colum-
bus about the weakest possible monument.
Walk through the city with Consul ; Doge's
palace ; cathedral ; girl turning somersaults
in the street : blind madman on the cathe-

UP AND DOWN GENOA. til

dral steps. We leave for Naples at twelve
midnight."

As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one
of the many good caffe in Genoa, and per-
haps some statistician will like to know that
for a beefsteak and potatoes, with a half-
bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a franc.
For this money we had also the society of an
unoccupied waiter, who leaned against a
marble column and looked on, with that
gentle, half -compassionate interest in our
appetites which seems native to the tribe of
waiters. A slight dash of surprise is in this
professional manner ; and there is a faint
smile on the solemn, professional counten-
ance, which is perhaps prompted by too
intimate knowledge of the mysteries of the
kitchen and the habits of the cook. The
man who passes his life among beefsteaks
cannot be expected to love them, or to
regard without wonder the avidity with
which others devour them. I imagine that
service in restaurants must beget simple and
natural tastes in eating, and that the jaded
men who minister there to our pampered ap-
petites demand only for themselves —

" A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied,
And water from the spring."

62 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

Turning from this thought to the purchase
of my hat, I do not believe that literary art
can interest the reader in that purely per-
sonal transaction, though I have no doubt
that a great deal might be said about buying
hats as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to
pass to our search for the Consul.

A former Consul at , whom I know, has

told me a good many stories about the pieces
of popular mind which he received at differ-
ent times from the travelling public, in
reproof of his difficulty of discovery ; and I
think it must be one of the most jealously
guarded rights of American citizens in for-
eign lands to declare the national represen-
tative hard to find, if there is no other
complaint to lodge against him. It seems to
be, in peculiar degree, a quality of consul-
ship at , to be found remote and inac-
cessible. My friend says that even at New
York, before setting out for his post, when
inquiring into the history of his prede-
cessors, he heard that they were one and all
hard to find ; and he relates that on the
steamer, going over, there was a low fellow
who set the table in a roar by a vulgar
anecdote to this effect : —

" There was once a Consul at ,who in-
dicated his office-hours by the legend on his

UP AND DOWN GENOA. 63

door, 'In from ten to one.' An old ship-
captain, who kept coming for about a week
without finding the Consul, at last furiously
wrote, in the terms of wager, under this
legend, ' Ten to one you 're out !'"

My friend also states that one day a visi-
tor of his remarked : " I 'm rather surprised
to find you in. As a general rule, I never
do find Consuls in." Habitually, his fellow-
countrymen entertained him with accounts
of their misadventures in reaching him. It
was useless to represent to them that his
house was in the most convenient locality in
— , where, indeed, no stranger can walk
twenty rods from his hotel without losing
himself ; that their guide was an ass, or
their courier a rogue. They listened to him
politely, but they never pardoned him in the
least ; and neither will I forgive the Consul
at Genoa. I had no earthly consular business
with him, but a private favoiir to ask. It
was Sunday, and I could not reasonably
expect to find him at his office, or anybody
to tell me where he lived ; but I have
seldom had so keen a sense of personal
wrong and national neglect as in my search
for that Consul's house.

In Italy there is no species of fact with
which any human being you meet will not

64 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

pretend to have perfect acquaintance, and,
of course, the driver whose fiacre we took
professed himself a complete guide to the
Consul's whereabouts, and took us succes-
sively to the residences of the Consuls of all
the South American republics. It occurred
to me that it might be well to inquire of
these officials where their colleague was to
be found ; but it is true that not one Consul
of them was at home ! Their doors wei-e
opened by vacant old women, in whom a
vague intelligence feebly guttered, like the
wick of an expiring candle, and who, after
feigning to throw floods of light on the
object of my search, successively flickered
out, and left me in total darkness.

Till that day, I never knew of what lofty
flights stairs were capable. As out-of-doors,
in Genoa, it is either all up or down hill,
so indoors it is either all up or down stairs.
Ascending and descending, in one palace
after another, those infinite marble steps, it
became a question, not solved to this hour,
whether it was worse to ascend or descend,
— each ordeal in its turn seemed so much
more terrible than the other.

At last I resolved to come to an under-
standing with the driver, and I spent what
little breath I had left — it was dry and hot

UP AND DOWN GENOA. (35

as the simoom — in blowing up that infamous
man. "You are a great driver," I said,
" not to know your own city. What are
you good for if you can't take a foreigner
to his Consul's ? " " Signore," answered the
driver patiently, " you would have to get a
book in two volumes by heart in order to
be able to find everybody in Genoa. This
city is a labyrinth."

Truly, it had so proved, and I could
scarcely believe in my good luck when I
actually found my friend, and set out with
him on a ramble through its toils.

A very great number of the streets in
Genoa are footways merely, and these are
as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chim-
ney-places, balconies, and opened window-
shutters, and as picturesque as the little
alleys in Venice. They wander at will
around the bases of the gloomy old stone
palaces, and seem to have a vagabond fond-
ness for creeping down to the port, and
losing themselves there in a certain cavern-
ous arcade which curves round the water
with the flection of the shore, and makes
itself a twilight at noonday. Under it are
clangorous shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling
shops of marine cooks, and, looking down its
dim perspective, one beholds chiefly sea-legs

VOL. T. E

66 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

coining and going, more or less affected by
strong waters ; and, as the faces to which
these sea-legs belong draw near, one dis-
cerns sailors from all parts of the world, —
tawny men from Sicily and Norway, as
diverse in their tawniness as olive and
train-oil ; sharp faces from Nantucket and
from the Piraeus, likewise mightily different
in their sharpness ; blonde Germans and
blonde Englishmen ; and now -and then a
coloured brother also in the seafaring line,
with sea-legs also, more or less affected by
strong waters like the rest.

What curious people are these seafarers !
They coast the whole world, and know
nothing of it, being more ignorant and
helpless than children on shore. I spoke
with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at
Venice, and asked him how he liked the
city.

Well, he had not been ashore yet.

He was told he had better go ashore ;
that the Piazza San Marco was worth
seeing.

Well, he knew it ; he had seen pictures of
it ; but he guessed he wouldn't go ashore.

Why not, now he was here ?

Well, he laid out to go ashore the next
time he came to Venice.

UP AND DOWX GENOA. 67

And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three
weeks at Venice with his ship, after a
voyage of two months, and he sailed away
without ever setting his foot on that en-
chanted ground.

I should have liked to stop some of those
seafarers and ask them what they thought
of Genoa.

It must have been in the little streets —
impassable for horses — that the people sat
and talked, as Heine fabled, in their door-
ways, and touched knees with the people
sitting and talking on the thresholds of the
opposite side. But we saw no gossipers
there on our Sunday in Genoa ; and I think
the domestic race of Heine's day no longer
lives in Genoa, for everybody we saw on
the streets was gaily dressed in the idea of
the last fashions, and was to be met chiefly
in the public promenades. The fashions
were French ; but here still lingers the
lovely phantom of the old national costume
of Genoa, and snow-white veils fluttered
from many a dark head, and caressed many
an olive cheek. It is the kindest and
charitablest of attirements, this white veil,
and, while decking beauty to the most
perilous effect, befriends and modifies age
and ugliness.

68 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

The pleasure with which I look at the
splendour of an Italian crowd in winter is
always touched with melancholy. I know
that, at the time of its noonday promenade,
it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its
stomach ; that it has emerged from a house
as cold and dim as a cellar ; and that it will
presently go home to dine on rice and boiled
beef. I know that chilblains secretly gnaw
the hands inside of its kid gloves, and I see
in the rawness of its faces the anguish of
winter-long suffering from cold. But I also
look at many in this crowd with the eye of
the economist, and wonder how people
practising even so great self-denial as they
can contrive to make so much display on
their little means, — how those clerks of
public offices, who have rarely an income of
five hundred dollars a year, can dress with
such peerless gorgeousness. I suppose the
national instinct teaches them ways and
means unknown to us. The passion for
dress is universal : the men are as fond of
it as the women ; and, happily, clothes are
comparatively cheap. It is no great harm
in itself, this display : it is only a pity that
there is often nothing, or worse than
nothing, under the shining surface.

We walked with the brilliant C4enoese

UP AND DOWN GENOA. 69

crowd upon the hill where the public pro-
menade overlooks a landscape of city and
country, houses and gardens, vines and
olives, which it makes the heart ache to be-
hold, it is so faultlessly beautiful. Behind
us the fountain

" Shaking its loosened silver in the sun ; "

the birds were singing ; and there were in-
numerable fair girls going by, about whom
one might have made romances if one had
not known better. Our friend pointed out
to us the "pink jail" in which Dickens
lived while in Genoa ; and showed us on the
brow of a distant upland the villa, called II
Paradiso, which Byron had occupied. I
daresay this Genoese joke is already in
print : That the Devil re-entered Paradise
when Byron took this villa. Though, in
loveliest Italy, one is half-persuaded that
the Devil had never left Paradise.

After lingering a little longer on that de-
licious height, we turned and went down
for a stroll through the city.

My notebook says that Genoa is the most
magnificent city I ever saw, and I hold
by my notebook, though I hardly know
how to prove it. Venice is, and remains, the
most beautiful city in the world ; but her

70 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

ancient rival impresses you with greater
splendour. I suppose that the exclusively
Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin de-
clares the architecture of pride, lends itself
powerfully to this effect in Genoa. It is
here in its best mood, and there is little gro-
tesque Renaissance to be seen, though the
palaces ai*e, as usual, loaded with, ornament.
The Via Nuova is the chief thoroughfare
of the city, and the crowd pours through
this avenue between long lines of palaces.
Height on height rise the stately, sculp-
tured facades, colonnaded, statued, pierced
by mighty doorways and lofty windows,
and the palaces seem to gain a kind of aris-
tocratic hauteur from the fact that there are
for the most part no side-walks, and that
the carriages, rolling insolently through
the crowd, threaten constantly to grind the
pedestrian up against their carven marbles
and immolate him to their stony pride.
There is something gracious and gentle in
the grandeur of Venice, and much that the
heart loves to cling to ; but in Genoa no
sense of kindliness is touched by the magni-
ficence of the city.

It was an unspeakable relief, after such
a street, to come, on a sudden, upon the
Duomo, one of the few Gothic buildings

UP AND DOWN GENOA. 71

in Genoa, and rest our jaded eyes on that
architecture which Heaven seems truly to
have put into the thoughts of man together
with the Christian faith. 0 beloved beauty
of aspiring arches, of slender and clustered
columns, of flowering capitals and win-
dow traceries, of maiiy-carven breadths and
heights, wherein all Nature breathes and
blossoms again ! There is neither Greek
perfection, nor winning Byzantine languor,
nor insolent Renaissance opulence, which
may compare with this loveliness of yours !
Alas that the interior of this Gothic temple
of Genoa should abound in the abomination
of rococo restoration ! They say that the
dust of St. John the Baptist lies there
within a costly shrine ; and I wonder that
it can sleep' in peace amid all that heathenish
show of bad taste. But the poor saints
have to suffer a great deal in Italy.

Outside, on the piazza before the church,
there was an idle, cruel crowd, amusing it-
self with the efforts of a blind old man to find
the entrance. He had a number of books
which he desperately laid down while he
ran his helpless hands over the clustered
columns, and which he then desperately
caught up again, in fear of losing them.
At other times he paused, and wildly clasped

72 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

his hands upon his eyes, or wildly threw up
his arms ; and then began to run to and fro
again uneasily, while the crowd laughed
and jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness
afflicted him ; but not the less he seemed
the type of a blind soul that gropes darkly
about through life, to find the doorway of
some divine truth or beauty, — touched by
the heavenly harmonies from within, and
miserably failing, amid the scornful cries
and bitter glee of those who have no will
but to mock aspiration.

The girl turning somersaults in another
place had far more popular sympathy than
the blind madman at the temple door, but
she was hardly a more cheerful spectacle.
For all her festive spangles and fairy-like
brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day
look upon her honest, blood-red face, as if
this were business though it looked like
sport, and her part of the diversion were as
practical as that of the famous captain of the
waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack
of potatoes a playful effect by standing on
his head. The poor damsel was going over
and over, to the sound of most dismal drum-
ming and braying, in front of the immense
old palace of the Genoese Doges, — a classic
building stilted on a rustic base, and quite

UP AND DOWN GENOA. 73

worthy of Palladio, if anybody thinks that
is praise.

There was little left of our day when we
had dined ; but having seen the outside of
Genoa, and not hoping to see the inside, we
found even this little heavy on our hands,
and were glad as the hour drew near when
we were to take the steamer for Naples.

It had been one of the noisiest days spent
during several years in clamorous Italy,
whose voicef ul uproar strikes to the summits
of her guardian Alps, and greets the coming
stranger, and whose loud Addio would stun
him at parting, if he had not meanwhile be-
come habituated to the operatic pitch of
her everyday tones. In Genoa, the hotels,
taking counsel of the vagabond streets, stand
about the cavernous arcade already men-
tioned, and all the noise of the shipping
reaches their guests. We rose early that
Sunday morning to the sound of a fleet un-
loading cargoes of wrought-iron, and of the
hard swearing of all nations of seafaring
men. The whole day long the tumult fol-
lowed us, aud seemed to culminate at last in
the screams of a parrot, who thought it fine
to cry, " Piove ! piove ! piove /" — "It rains !
it rains ! it rains ! " — and had, no doubt, a
secret interest in some umbrella shop. This

74 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

unprincipled bird dwelt somewhere in the
neighbourhood of the street where you see
the awful tablet in the wall devoting to in-
famy the citizens of the old republic that
were false to their country. The sight of
that pitiless stone recalls with a thrill the
picturesque, unhappy past, with all the
wandering, half-benighted efforts of the
people to rend their liberty from now a
foreign and now a native lord. At best,
they only knew how to avenge their
wrongs ; but now, let us hope, they have
learnt, with all Italy, to prevent them.
The will was never wanting of old to the
Ligurian race, and in this time they have
done their full share to establish Italian
freedom.

I do not know why it should have been so
surprising to hear the boatman who rowed
us to the steamer's anchorage speak
English ; but, after his harsh Genoese
profanity in getting his boat into open
water, it was the last thing we expected
from him. It had somehow the effect of a
furious beast addressing you in your native
tongue, and telling you it was " Wary
poordy wedder ; " and it made us cling to
his good-nature with the trembling solici-
tude of Little Red Riding-Hood, when she

UP AND DOWN GENOA. 75

begins to have the first faint suspicions of
her grandmother. However, our boatman
was no wild beast, but took our six cents of
luonamano with the base servility of a
Christian man, when he had put our
luggage in the cabin of the steamer. I
wonder how he should have known us for
Americans? He did so know us, and said
he had been at New York in better days,
when he voyaged upon higher seas than
those he now navigated.

On board, we watched with compassion
an old gentleman in the cabin making a
hearty meal of sardines and fruit-pie, and
I asked him if he had ever been at sea.
"No," he said. I could have wept over that
innocent old gentleman's childlike confi-
dence of appetite and guileless trust of
the deep.

We went on deck, where one of the
gentle beings of our party declared that she
would remain as long as Genoa was in
sight ; and, to tell the truth, the scene was
worthy of the promised devotion. There,
in a half-circle before us, blazed the lights
of the quay; above these twinkled the
lamps of the steep streets and climbing
palaces ; over and behind all hung the
darkness on the heights, — a sable cloud

76 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

dotted with ruddy points of flame burning
in the windows of invisible houses.

'•' Merrily did we drop "

down the bay, and presently caught the
heavy swell of the open sea. The other
gentle being of our party then clutched my
shoulder with a dreadful shudder, and, after
gasping, ' ' 0 Mr. Scribbler, why imll the ship
roll so?" was meekly hurried below by her
sister, who did not return for a last glimpse
of Genoa the Proud.

In a moment heaven's sweet pity flapped
away as with the seagull's wings, and I too
felt that there was no help for it, and that
I must go and lie down in the cabin. With
anguished eyes I beheld upon the shelf op-
posite to mine the innocent old gentleman
who had lately supped so confidently on
sardines and fruit-pie. He lay upon his
back, groaning softly to himself.

BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 77

VI.

BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES.

I IKE the Englishman who had no pre-
J judices, I do hate a Frenchman j and
there were many Frenchmen among our pas-
sengers on the Messina, in whose company
I could hardly have been happy, had I not
seen them horribly sea-sick. After the im-
prudent old gentleman of the sardines and
fruit-pie, these wretched Gauls were the
first to be seized with the malady, which
became epidemic, and were miserable up to
the last moment 011 board. To the enormity
of having been born Frenchmen, they added
the crime of being commercial travellers, — a
class of fellow-men of whom we know little
at home, but who are met everywhere in
European travel. They spend more than
half their lives in movement from place to
place, and they learn to snatch from every
kind of travel its meagre comforts, with an
insolent disregard of the rights and feelings
of other passengers. They excuse an abom-

78 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

iiiable trespass with a cool " Pardon !" take
the best seat everywhere, and especially
treat women with a savage rudeness, to
which an American vainly endeavours to
accustom his temper. I have seen com-
mercial travellers of all nations, and I
think I must award the French nation the
discredit of producing the most odious com-
mercial travellers in the world. The English-
man of this species wraps himself in his rugs,
and rolls into his corner, defiantly, but not
aggressively, boorish ; the Italian is almost
a gentleman ; the German is apt to take
sausage out of a newspaper and eat it with
his penknife ; the Frenchman aggravates
human nature beyond endurance by his rest-
less ill-breeding, and his evident intention
not only to keep all his own advantages,
but to steal some of yours upon the first
occasion. There were three of these mon-
sters on our steamer : one a slight, bloodless
young man, with pale blue eyes and an in-
credulous grin ; another, a gigantic full-
bearded animal in spectacles ; the third, an
infamous plump little creature, in absurdly
tight pantaloons, with a cast in his eye, and
a habit of sucking his teeth at table. When
this wretch was not writhing in the agonies
of sea-sickness he was on deck with his com-

BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 79

rades, lecturing them upon various things,
to which the bloodless young man listened
with his incredulous grin, and the bearded
giant in spectacles attended with a choked
look about the eyes, like a suffering ox.
They were constantly staggering in and out
of their state-room, which, for my sins, was
also mine ; and opening their abominable
commodious travelling bags, or brushing
their shaggy heads at the reeling mirror,
and since they were born into the world, I
think they had never cleaned their finger-
nails. They wore their hats at dinner, but
always went away, after soup, deadly pale.

ii.

IN contrast with these cattle, what pol-
ished and courtly gentlemen were the sailors
and firemen ! As for our captain, he would
in any company have won notice for his
gentle and high-bred way ; in his place at
the head of the table among these French-
men, he seemed to me the finest gentleman
I had ever seen. He had spent his whole
life at sea, and had voyaged in all parts of
the world except Japan, where he meant
some day, he said, to go. He had been first
a cabin-boy on a little Genoese schooner, and
he had gradually risen to the first place on a

80 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

sailing-vessel, and now he had been selected
to fill a commander's post on this line of
steamers. (It is an admirable line of boats,
not belonging, I believe, to the Italian Gov-
ernment, but much under its control, leaving
Genoa every day for Leghorn, Naples, Pal-
ermo, and Ancona, on the Adriatic coast.)
The captain had sailed a good deal in Ameri-
can waters, but chiefly on the Pacific coast,
trading from the Spanish republican ports to
those of California. He had been in that
State during its effervescent days, when
everything foul floated to the top, and I am
afraid he formed there but a bad opinion of
our people, though he was far too courteous
to say outright anything of this sort.

He had very fine, shrewd blue eyes, a
lean, weather-beaten, kindly face, and a
cautious way of saying things. I hardly
expected him to turn out so red-hot a
Democrat as he did on better acquaintance,
but, being a warm friend of man myself, I
was not sorry. Garibaldi was the beginning
and ending of his political faith, as he is
with every enthusiastic Italian. The honest
soul's conception of all concrete evil was
brought forth in two words, of odd enough
application. In Europe, and Italy more
particularly, true men have suffered chiefly

EY SEA FKOM GKNOA TO NAPLES. 81

from this form of evil, and the captain evi-
dently could conceive of 110 other cause of
suffering anywhere. "We were talking of
the American war, and when the captain
had asked the usual question, " Quando
fiirirci mai questa guerra ?" and I had re-
sponded as usual, " Alt, a vuol pazienza /"
the captain gave a heavy sigh, and, turning
his head pensively aside, plucked his grapes
from the cluster a moment in silence.

Then he said, "You Americans are in
the habit of attributing this war to slavery.
The cause is not sufficient. "

I ventured to demur and explain. " No,"
said the captain, "the cause is not sufficient.
We Italians know the only cause which
could produce a war like this."

I was naturally anxious to be instructed
in the Italian theoiy, hoping it might be
profounder than the English notion that we
were fighting about tariffs.

The captain frowned, looked at me care-
fully, and then said —

"In this world there is but one cause of
mischief — the Jesuits."

in.

THE first night out, from Genoa, to Leg-
horn, was bad enough, but that which suc-

VOL. I. F

82 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

ceeded our departure from the latter port
was by far the worst of the three we spent
in our voyage to Naples. How we envied
the happy people who went ashore at Leg-
horn ! I think we even envied the bones of
the Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese who met
and slew each other in the long-forgotten
sea-fights, and sank too deeply through the
waves to be stirred by their restless tumult.
Every one has heard tell of how cross and
treacherous a sea the Mediterranean is in
winter, and my own belief is, that he who
has merely been sea-sick on the Atlantic
should give the Mediterranean a trial be-
fore professing to have suffered everything
of which human nature is capable. Our
steamer was clean enough and staunch
enough, but she was not large — no bigger, I
thought, than a gondola, that night as the
waves tossed her to and fro, till mi winged
things took flight all through her cabins and
over her decks. My berth was placed trans-
versely instead of lengthwise with the boat,
— an ingenious arrangement to heighten sea-
sick horrors, and dash the blood of the suf-
ferer from brain to boots with exaggerate*!
violence at each roll of the boat ; and 1
begged the steward to let me sleep upon one
of the lockers in the cabin. I found many

BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 83

of my agonised species already laid out
there ; and the misery of the three French
commercial travellers was so great that, in
the excess of my own dolor, it actually
afforded me a kind of happiness, and I found
myself smiling at times to see the giant,
with the eyes of a choked ox, rise up and
faintly bellow. Indeed, there was some-
thing eldritch and unearthly in the whole
business, and I think a kind of delirium
must have resulted from the sea-sickness.
Otherwise, I shall not know how to account
for having attributed a kind of consciousness
and individuality to the guide-book of a
young American who had come aboard at
Leghorn. He turned out afterward to be
the sweetest soul in the world, and I am
sorry now that I regarded with amusement
his failure to smoke off his sickness. He
was reading his guide-book with great dili-
gence and unconcern, when suddenly I
marked him lay it softly, softly down, with
that excessive deliberation which men use
at such times, and vanish with great dignity
from the scene. Thus abandoned to its
own devices, this guide-book began its
night-long riots, setting out upon a tour of
the cabin with the first lurch of the boat
that threw it from the table upon the floor.

84 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

I heard it careen at once wildly to the cabin
door and knock to get out ; and, failing in
this, return deliberately to the stern of the
boat, interrogating the tables and chairs,
which had got their sea-legs on, and ask-
ing them how they found themselves.
Arrived again at the point of starting,
it seemed to pause a moment, and then I
saw it setting forth on a voyage of plea-
sure in the low company of a French hat,
which, being itself a French book, I sup-
pose it liked. In these travels they both
ran under the feet of one of the stewards,
and were replaced by an immense tour de,
force on the table, from which the book
eloped again, — this time in company with an
overcoat : but it seemed the coat was too
miserable to go far ; it stretched itself at full
length on the floor, and suffered the book to
dance over it, back and forth, I know not
how many times. At last, as the actions
of the book were becoming unendurable, and
the general sea-sickness was waxing into a
frenzy, a heavy roll, that made the whole
ship shriek and tremble, threw us all fr^ni
our lockers ; and gathering myself up, bruised
and sore in every fibre, I lay down again and
became sensible of a blissful, blissful lull ; the
machinery had stopped, and, with the mute

BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES. 85

hope that we were all going to the bottom, I
fell tranquilly asleep.

IT appeared that the storm had really been
dangerous. Instead of being only six hours
from Naples, as we ought to be at this time,
we were got no further than Porto Longone,
in the Isle of Elba. We woke in a quiet,
sheltered little bay, whence we could only
behold, not feel, the storm left far out upon
the open sea. From this we turned our
heavy eyes gladly to the shore, where a
white little town settled, like a flight of gulls
upon the beach, at the feet of green and plea-
sant hills, whose gentle lines rhymed softly
away against the sky. At the end of either
arm of the embracing land in which we lay,
stood grey, placid old forts, with peaceful
sentries pacing their bastions, and weary
ships creeping round their feet, under guns
looking out so kindly and harmlessly, that

I think General himself would not

have hesitated (except, perhaps, from a pro-
found sentiment of regret for offering the
violence) to attack them. Our port was full
of frightened shipping — steamers, brigs, and
schooners — of all sizes and nations ; and
since it was our misfortune that Napoleon

86 ITALIA X JOURNEYS.

spent his exile in Elba at Porto Ferrate
instead of Porto Longone, we amused our-
selves with looking at the vessels and the
white town and the soft hills, instead of
hunting up dead lion's tracks.

Our fellow-passengers began to develop
themselves, the regiment of soldiers whom
we were transporting picturesquely break-
fasted forward, and the second-cabin people
came aft to our deck, while the English
engineer (there are English engineers on all
the Mediterranean steamers) planted a
camp-stool in a sunny spot, and sat down to
read the Birmingham Express.

Our friends of the second cabin were
chiefly officers with their wives and fami-
lies, and they talked for the most part
of their sufferings during the night. They
spoke such exquisite Italian that I thought
them Tuscans, but they told rue they were
of Sicily, where their beautiful speech first
had life. Let us hear what they talked of
in their divine language, and with thatf
ineffable tonic accent which no foreigner
perfectly acquires ; and let us for once trans-
late the profanities, Pagan and Christian,
which adorn common parlance in Italy : —

"Ah, my God ! how much I suffered !"
says a sweet little woman with gentle brown

MY SKA FROM CENOA TO NAPLES. 87

eyes, red, red lips, and blameless Greek lines
of face. ' ' I broke two basins ! "

" There were ten broken in all, by Diana ! "
says this lady's sister.

"Presence of the Devil!" says her hus-
band ; and

" Body of Bacchus !" her young brother,
puffing his cigar.

" And you, sir,'' said the lady, turning to a
handsome young fellow in civil dress, near
her, " how did you pass this horrible night ?"

"Oh!" says the young man, twirling
his heavy blond mustache, " mighty well —
mighty well ! "

" Oh, mercy of God ! You were not sick ? ''

" I, Signora, am never sea-sick. I am of
the navy."

At which they all cry Oh, and Ah, and
declare they are glad of it, though why they
should have been I don't know to this day.

"I have often wished," added the young
man meditatively, and in a serious tone, as
if he had indeed given the subject much
thought, ' ' that it might please God to let
me be sea-sick once, if only that I might
know how it feels. But no ! " He turned
the conversation, as if his disappointment
were too sore to dwell upon ; and, hearing
our English, he made out to let us know

88 ITALIAN" JOURNEYS.

that he had been at New York, and could
speak our language, which he proceeded to
do, to the great pride of his countrymen, and
our own astonishment at the remarkable
forms of English speech to which he gave
utterance.

WE set out from Porto Longone that night
at eight o'clock, and next evening, driving
through much-abated storm southward into
calm waters and clear skies, reached Naples.
At noon, Monte Circeo, where Circe led her
disreputable life, was a majestic rock against
blue heaven and broken clouds ; after night-
fall, and under the risen moon, Vesuvius
crept softly up from the sea, arid stood a
graceful steep, with wreaths of lightest cloud
upon its ci-est, and the city lamps circling
far round its bav.

CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 89

VII.

CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES.

PERHAPS some reader of mine who
visited Naples under the old disorder
of things, when the Bourbon and the
Camorra reigned, will like to hear that the
pitched battle which travellers formerly
fought, in landing from their steamer, is
now gone out of fashion. Less truculent
boatmen I never saw than those who rowed
us ashore at Naples ; they were so quiet
and peaceful that they harmonised perfectly
with that tranquil scene of drowsy-
twinkling city lights, slumbrous mountains,
and calm sea, and, as they dipped softly
toward us in the glare of the steamer's
lamps, I could only think of Tennyson's
description : —

" And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against the rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters came."

The mystery of this placidity had been

90 ITALIAN' JOURNEYS.

already solved by our captain, whom I had
asked what price I should bargain to pay
from the steamer to the shore. ' ' There is
a tariff," said he, " and the boatmen keep
to it. The Neapolitans are good people
(bttona gente), and only needed justice to
make them obedient to the laws." I must
say that I found this to be true. The fares
of all public conveyances are now fixed, and
the attempts which drivers occasionally
make to cheat you seem to be rather the
involuntary impulses of old habit than
deliberate intentions ±o do you wrong.
You pay what is due, and as your mrn
merely rumbles internally when you turn
away, you must be a very timid signorin
indeed if you buy his content with any-
thing more. I fancy that all these things
are now much better managed in Italy than
in America, only we grumble at them there
and stand them in silence at home. Every
one can recall frightful instances of plunder,
in which he was the victim, at New York —
in which the robbery had none of the neat-
ness of an operation, as it often has in Italy,
but was a brutal mutilation. And then as
regards civility from the same kind of
people in the two countries, there is no
comparison that holds in favour of us. All

CERTAIN* THINGS IN' NAPLES. 91

questions are readily and politely answered
in Italian travel, and the servants of com-
panies are required to be courteous to the
public; whereas, one is only too glad to
receive a silent snub from such people at
home.

THE first sun that rose after our arrival
in Naples was mild and warm as a May
sun, though we were quite in the heart
of November. We early strolled out under
it into the crowded ways of the city, and
drew near as we might to that restless,
thronging, gossiping southern life, in
contrast with which all northern existence
seems only a sort of hibernation. The long
Toledo, on which the magnificence of modern
Naples is threaded, is the most brilliant and
joyous street in the world ; but I think there
is less of the quaintuess of Italian civilisation
to be seen in its vivacious crowds than any-
where else in Italy. One easily understands
how, with its superb length and straightness,
and its fine, respectable, commonplace-look-
ing houses, it should be the pride of a people
fond of show ; but after Venice and Genoa
it has 110 picturesque charm ; nay, even busy
Milan seems less modern and more pictur-

9*2 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

esque. The lines of the lofty palaces on the
Toledo are seldom broken by the fa9ade of a
church or other public edifice ; and when
this does happen, the building is sure to be
coldly classic or frantically baroque.

You weary of the Toledo's perfect repair,
of its monotonous iron balconies, its mono-
tonous lofty windows ; and it would be in-
sufferable if you could not turn out from it
at intervals into one of those wondrous little
streets which branch up on one hand and
down on the other, rising and falling with
flights of steps between the high, many-
balconied walls. They ring all day with the
motleyest life of fishermen, fruit-vendors,
chestnut-roasters, and idlers of every age
and sex ; and there is nothing so fiill of local
colour, unless it be the little up-aiid-down-
hill streets in Genoa. Like those, the by-
streets of Naples are only meant for foot-
passengers, and a carriage never enters them ;
but sometimes, if you are so blest, you may
see a mule climbing the long stairways, mov-
ing solemnly under a stack of straw, or
tinkling gaily down-stairs, bestridden by
a swarthy, handsome peasant — all glittering
teeth and eyes and flaming Phrygian cap.
The rider exchanges lively salutations and
sarcasms with the bystanders in his way,

CERTAIN THINGS IX NAPLES. 93

and perhaps brushes against the bag-pipers
who bray constantly in those hilly defiles.
They are in Neapolitan costume, these pijfer-
ari, and have their legs incomprehensibly
tied up in the stockings and garters affected
by the peasantry of the provinces, and wear
brave red sashes about their waists. They
are simple, harmless-looking people, and
would no doubt rob and kill in the most
amiable manner, if brigandage came into
fashion hi their neighbourhood.

Sometimes the student of men may witness
a Neapolitan quarrel in these streets, and
may pick up useful ideas of invective from
the remarks of the fat old women who always
take part in the contests. But, though we
were ten days in Naples, I only saw one
quarrel, and I could have heard much finer
violence of language among the gondoliers
at any ferry in Venice than I heard in this
altercation.

The Neapolitans are, of course, furious in
traffic. They sell a great deal, and very
boisterously, the fruit of the cactus, which
is about as large as an egg, and which, they
peel to a very bloody pulp, and lay out, a
sanguinary presence, on boards for purchase.
It is not good to the uncultivated taste ; but
the stranger may stop and drink, with relish

94 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

and refreshment, the orangeade and lemonade
mixed with snow, and sold at the little
booths on the street comers. These stands
look much like the shrines of the Madonna
in other Italian cities, and a friend of ours
was led, before looking carefully into their
office, to argue immense Neapolitan piety
from the frequency of their ecclesiastical
architecture. They are, indeed, the shrines
of a god much worshipped during the long
Neapolitan summers ; and it was the pro-
found theory of the Bourbon kings of Naples,
that, if they kept their subjects well sup-
plied with snow to cool their drink, there
was no fear of revolution. It shows how
liable statesmen are to err, that, after all,
the Neapolitans rose, drove out the Bourbons,
and welcomed Garibaldi.

The only part of the picturesque life of the
side streets which seems ever to issue from
them into the Toledo is the goatherd with
his flock of milch-goats, which mingle with
the passers in the avenues as familiarly as
with those of the alley, and thrust aside silk-
hidden hoops, and brush against dandies'
legs, in their course, biit keep on perfect
terms with everybody. The goatherd leads
the eldest of the flock, and the rest follow
in docile order, and stop as he stops to ask at

CERTAIN THINGS IX NAPLES. 95

the doors if milk is wanted. When he hap-
pens to have an order, one of the goats is
haled, much against her will, into the entry
of a house, and there milked, while the
others wait outside alone, nibbling and
smelling thoughtfully about the masonry.
It is noticeable that none of the good-
natured passers seem to think these goats
a great nuisance in the crowded street ;
but all make way for them as if they were
there by perfect right, and were no incon-
venience.

On the Toledo people keep upon the nar-
row side-walks, or strike out into the car-
riage-way, with an indifference to hoofs and
wheels which one, after long residence in
tranquil Venice, cannot acquire, in view of
the furious Neapolitan driving. That old
comprehensive gig of Naples, with which
many pens and pencils have familiarised
the reader, is nearly as hard to find there
now as the lizzaroni, who have gone out alto-
gether. You may still see it in the remoter
quarters of the city, with its complement of
twelve passengers to one horse, distributed,
two cii each thill, four on the top seats, one
at each side, and two behind ; but in the
Toledo it has given place to much finer
vehicles. Slight buggies, which take you

1>G ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

anywhere for half a franc, are the favourite
means of public conveyance, and the private
turn-outs are of every description and degree.
Indeed, all the Neapolitans take to carriages,
and the Strand in London at six o'clock in
the evening is not a greater jam of wheels
than the Toledo in the afternoon. Shopping
feels the expansive influence of the out-of-
doors life, and ladies do most of it as they
sit in their open carriages at the shop doors,
ministered to by the neat-handed shopmen.
They are very languid ladies, as they recline
upon their carriage cushions ; they are all
black-eyed, and of an olive pallor, and have
gloomy rings about their fine eyes, like the
dark-faced dandies who bow to them. This
Neapolitan look is very curious, and I have
not seen it elsewhere in Italy ; it is a look
of peculiar pensiveness, and conies, no doubt,
from the peculiarly heavy growth of lashes
which fringes the lower eyelid. Then there
is the weariness in it of all peoples whose
summers are fierce and long.

As the Italians usually dress beyond their
means, the dandies of Naples are very gor-
geous. If it is now, say, four o'clock in the
afternoon, they are all coming down the
Toledo with the streams of carriages bound
for the long drive around the bay. But our

CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 97

foot-passers go to walk in the beautiful
Villa Reale, between this course and the
sea. The Villa is a slender strip of Para-
dise, a mile long ; it is rapture to walk in it,
and it comes, in description, to be a garden-
grove, with feathery palms, Greekish tem-
ples, musical fountains, white statues of the
gods, and groups of fair girls in spring silks.
If I remember aright, the sun is always
setting on the bay, and you cannot tell
whether this sunset is cooled by the water
or the water is warmed by the golden light
upon it, and upon the city, and upon all the
soft mountain-heights around.

WALKING westward through the whole
length of the Villa Reale, and keeping with
the crescent shore of the bay, you come,
after a while, to the Grot of Posilipo, which
is not a grotto, but a tunnel cut for a carriage-
way under the hill. It serves, however, the
purpose of a grotto, if a grotto has any, and
is of great length and dimness, and is all
a-twinkle night and day with numberless
lamps. Overlooking the street which passes
into it is the tomb of Virgil, and it is this
you have come to see. To reach it, you
knock first at the door of a blacksmith, who

VOL. i. G

98 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

calls a species of custodian, and, when this
latter has opened a gate in a wall, you follow
him up -stairs into a market garden.

In one corner, and standing in a leafy and
grassy shelter, somewhat away from the
vegetables, is the poet's tomb, which has a
kind of claim to genuineness by virtue of its
improbable appearance. It looks more like
a bake-oven than even the Pompeian tombs ;
the masonry is antique, and is at least in
skilful imitation of the fine Roman work.
The interior is a small chamber with vaulted
or wagon-roof ceiling, under which a man
may stand upright, and at the end next the
street is a little stone commemorating the
place as Virgil's tomb, which was placed
there by the Queen of France in 1840, and
said by the custodian (a singularly dull ass)
to be an exact copy of the original, whatever
the original may have been. This guide
could tell us nothing more about it, and was
too stupidly honest to pretend to know more.
The laurel planted by Petrarch at the door
of the tomb, and renewed in later times by
Casimir Delavigne, has been succeeded by a
third laurel. The present twig was so
slender, and looked so friendless and unpro-
tected, that even enthusiasm for the memory
of two poets could not be brought to rob it

CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 99

of one of its few leaves ; and we contented
ourselves with plucking some of the grass
and weeds that grew abundantly on the roof
of the tomb.

There was a dusty quiet within the tomb,
and a grassy quiet without, that pleased
exceedingly ; but though the memories of
the place were so high and epic, it only
suggested bucolic associations, and, sunken
into that nook of hill-side verdure, made me
think of a spring-house on some far-away
Ohio farm ; a thought that, perhaps, would
not have offended the poet, who loved and
sang of humble country things, and, drawing
wearily to his rest here, no doubt turned
and remembered tenderly the rustic days
before the excellent veterans of Augustus
came to exile him from his father's farm at
Mantua, and banish him to mere glory.
But I believe most travellers have much
nobler sensations in Virgil's tomb, and there
is a great deal of testimony borne to their
lofty sentiments on every scribbleable inch
of its walls. Valery reminded me that
Boccaccio, standing near it of old, first felt
his fate decided for literature. Did he come
there, I wonder, with poor ^Fiammetta, and
enter the tomb with her tender hand in his,
before ever he thought of that cruel absence

100 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

she tells of ? "0 clonne pietose !" I hope
so, and that this pilgrimage, half of love
and half of letters, took place, ' ' nel tempo
nel quale la rivestita terra piu die tutto
Paltro anno si mostra bella."

If you ascend from the tomb and turn
Naples- ward from the crest of the hill, you
have the loveliest view in the world of the
sea and of the crescent beach, mightily
jewelled at its further horn with the black
Castel dell' Ovo. Fishermen's children are
playing all along the foamy border of the
sea, and boats are darting out into the surf.
The present humble muse is not above saying
also that the linen which the laundresses
hang to dry upon lines along the beach takes
the sun like a dazzling flight of white birds,
and gives a breezy life to the scene which it
could not spare.

IV.

THERE was a little church on our way
back from Posilipo, into which we lounged
a moment, pausing at the altar of some very
successful saint near the door. Here there
were great numbers of the usual offerings
from the sick whom the saint had eased of
their various ills, — waxen legs and arms
from people who had been in peril of losing

CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 101

their limbs, as well as eyes, noses, fingers,
and feet, and the crutches of those cured of
lameness; but we were most amused with
the waxen effigies of several entire babies
hung up about the altar, which the poor
souls who had been near losing the originals
had brought there in gratitude to the saint.
Generally, however, the churches of
Naples are not very interesting, and one
who came away without seeing them would
have little to regret. The pictures are
seldom good ; and though there are magnifi-
cent chapels in St. Januarius, and fine
Gothic tombs at Santa Chiara, the archi-
tecture is usually rococo. I fancy that
Naples has felt the damage of Spanish taste
in such things as well as Spanish tyranny in
others. Indeed, I saw much there which
reminded me of what I had read about
Spain rather than what I had seen in Italy ;
and all Italian writers are agreed in attri-
buting the depravation of Naples to the long
Spanish dominion. It is well known how
the Spaniards rule their provinces, and their
gloomy despotism was probably never more
cruelly felt than in Italy, where the people
were least able to bear it. I had a heart-
felt exultation in walking through the
quarter of the city where the tumults of

102 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

Massaniello had raged, and, if only for a
few days, struck mortal terror to the brutal
pride of the viceroy ; but I think I had a
better sense of the immense retribution
which has overtaken all memory of Spanish
rule in Naples as we passed through the
palace of Capo di Monte. This was the
most splendid seat of the Spanish Bourbon,
whose family, inheriting its power from the
violence of other times, held it with violence
in these ; and in one of the chief saloons of
the palace, which is now Victor Emanuel's,
were pictures representing scenes of the
revolution of 1860, while the statuette of a
Garibaldino, in his red shirt and all his
heroic rudeness, was defiantly conspicuous
on one of the tables.

THERE was nothing else that pleased me
as well in the palace, or in the grounds
about it. These are all laid out in pleasant
successions of grove, tangled wilderness,
and pasture-land, and . were thronged, the
Saturday afternoon of our visit, with all
ranks of people, who strolled through the
beautiful walks and enjoyed themselves in
the peculiarly peaceful Italian way. Valery
says that the Villa Reale in the Bourbon

CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 103

time was closed, except for a single day in
the year, to all but the nobles ; and that on
this occasion it was filled with pretty
peasant women, who made it a condition of
their marriage bargains that their husbands
should bring them to the Villa Reale on St.
Mary's Day. It is now free to all on every
day of the year, and the grounds of the
Palace Capo di Monte are opened every
Saturday. I liked the pleasant way in
which sylvan Nature and Art had made
friends in these beautiful grounds, in which
Nature had consented to overlook even the
foolish vanity of the long aisles of lime, cut
and trimmed in formal and fantastic shapes,
according to the taste of the silly times of
bagwigs and patches. On every side wild
birds fluttered through these absurd trees,
and in the thickets lurked innumerable
pheasants, which occasionally issued forth
and stalked in stately, fearless groups over
the sunset-crimsoned lawns. There was a
brown gamekeeper for nearly every head of
game, wearing a pheasant's wing in his hat
and carrying a short, heavy sword ; and our
driver told us, with an awful solemnity in
his bated breath, that no one might kill this
game but the king, under penalty of the
galleys.

104 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

VI.

WE went one evening to the opera at San
Carlo. It is one of the three theatres— San
Carlo of Naples, La Scala of Milan, and
Fenice of Venice— on which the Italians
pride themselves ; and it is certainly very
large and imposing. The interior has a bel
colpo d'occhio, which is what many Italians
chiefly value in morals, manners, and archi-
tecture ; but after this comes great shabbiness
of detail. The boxes, even of the first order,
are paved with brick tiles, and the red
velvet border of the box which the people
see from the pit is not supported in style by
the seats within, which are merely covered
with red oil-cloth. The opera we saw was
also second-rate, and was to the splendour of
the scenic arrangements what the oil-cloth
was to the velvet. The house was full of
people, but the dress of the audience was not
so fine as we had expected in Naples. The
evening dress is not de rigueur at Italian
theatres, and people seemed to have come to
San Carlo in any pleasant carelessness of
costume.

VII.

THE Italians are simple and natural folks,

CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES. 105

pleased through all their show of convention-
ality with little things, and as easy and
unconscious as children in their ways. There
happened to be a new caflte opened in Naples
while we were there, and we had the plea-
sure of seeing all ranks of people affected by
its magnificence. Artless throngs blocked
the side-walk day and night before its
windows, gazing upon its mirrors, fountains,
and frescoes, and regarding the persons over
their coffee within as beings lifted by sudden
magic out of the common orbit of life and set
dazzling in a higher sphere. All the waiters
were uniformed and brass-buttoned to blind-
ing effect, and the head waiter was a majestic
creature in a long blue coat reaching to his
feet, and armed with a mighty silver-headed
staff. This gorgeous apparition did nothing
but walk up and down, and occasionally
advance toward the door, as if to disperse
the crowds. At such times, however, before
executing his purpose, he would glance round
on the splendours they were admiring, and, as
if smitten with a sense of the enormous
cruelty he had meditated in thinking to
deprive them of the sight, would falter and
turn away, leaving his intent unfulfilled.

106 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

VIII.

A DAY IN POMPEII.
I.

ON the second morning after our arrival
in Naples, we took the seven o'clock
train, which leaves the Nineteenth Century
for the first cycle of the Christian Era, and,
skirting the waters of the Neapolitan bay
almost the whole length of our journey,
reached the railway station of Pompeii in an
hour. As we rode along by that bluest sea,
we saw the fishing-boats go out, and the
foamy waves (which it would be an insolent
violence to call breakers) come in ; we saw
the mountains slope their tawny and golden
manes caressingly downward to the waters,
where the islands were dozing yet ; and land-
ward, on the left, we saw Vesuvius, with his
brown mantle of ashes drawn close about
his throat, reclining on the plain, and smok-
ing a bland and thoughtful morning pipe, of
which the silver fumes curled lightly, lightly
upward in the sunrise.

We dismounted at the station, walked a

A DAY IN POMPEII. 107

few rods eastward through a little cotton-
field, and found ourselves at the door of
Hotel Diomed, where we took breakfast for
a number of sesterces, which I am sure it
would have made an ancient Pompeian stir
in his urn to think of paying. But in Italy
one learns the chief Italian virtue, patience,
and we paid our account with the utmost
good-nature. There was compensation in
store for us, and the guide whom we found
at the gate leading up the little hill to
Pompeii inclined the disturbed balance in
favour of our happiness. He was a Roman,
spoke Italian that Beatrice might have ad-
dressed to Dante, and was numbered Twenty-
six. I suppose it is known that the present
Italian Government forbids people to be pil-
laged in any way on its premises, and that
the property of the State is no longer the
traffic of custodians and their pitiless race.
At Pompeii each person pays two francs for
admission, and is rigorously forbidden by
recurrent sign-boards to offer money to the
guides. Ventisei (as we shall call him)
himself pointed out one of these notices in
English, and did his duty faithfully without
asking or receiving fees in money. He was
a soldier, like all the other guides, and was
a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a

108 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

self-respect and dignity worthy of one of
our own volunteer soldiers.

Ventisei took us up the winding slope,
and led us out of this living world through
the Sea-gate of Pompeii back into the dead
past — the past which, with all its sensuous
beauty and grace, and all its intellectual
power, I am not sorry to have dead, and,
for the most part, buried. Our feet had
hardly trodden the lava flagging of the
narrow streets when we came in sight of
the labourers who were exhuming the inani-
mate city. They were few in number, not
perhaps a score, and they worked tediously,
with baskets to carry away the earth from the
excavation, boys and girls carrying the bas-
kets, and several athletic old women plying
picks, while an overseer sat in a chair near
by, and smoked, and directed their exertions.

They dig down about eight or ten feet,
uncovering the walls and pillars of the houses,
and the mason, who is at hand, places little
iron rivets in the stucco to prevent its fall
where it is weak, while an artist attends to
wash and clean the frescoes as fast as they are
exposed. The soil through which the excava-
tion first passes is not of great depth ; the
ashes which fell damp with scalding rain, in
the second eruption, are perhaps five feet

A DAY IN POMPEII. 109

thick ; the rest is of that porous stone which
descended in small fragments during the first
eruption. A depth of at least two feet in
this stone is always left untouched by the
labourers till the day when the chief superin-
tendent of the work conies out from Naples
to see the last layers removed ; and it is then
that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the
houses are uncovered, and the interesting
and valuable objects are nearly always found.
The wonder was, seeing how slowly the
work proceeded, not that two-thirds of
Pompeii were yet buried, but that one-third
had been exhumed. We left these hopeless
toilers, and went down-town into the Forum,
stepping aside on the way to look into one
of the Pompeian Courts of Common Pleas.

ii.

Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel
and surprise, that it would be unreasonable
to express disappointment with Pompeii in
fiction. And yet I cannot help it. An
exuberant carelessness of phrase in most
writers and talkers who describe it had led
me to expect much more than it was possible
to find there. In my Pompeii I confess that
the houses had no roofs — in fact, the rafters
which sustained the tiles being burnt, how

110 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

could the roofs help falling in ? But other-
wise my Pompeii was a very complete affair :
the walls all rose to their full height ; door-
ways and arches were perfect ; the columns
were all unbroken and upright ; putting
roofs on my Pompeii, you might have lived
in it very comfortably. The real Pompeii
is different. It is seldom that any wall is
unbroken ; most columns are fragmentary ;
and, though the ground-plans are always dis-
tinct, very few rooms 'hi the city are perfect
in form, and the whole is much more ruinous
than I thought.

But this ruin once granted, and the idle
disappointment at its greatness overcome,
there is endless material for study, instruc-
tion, and delight. It is the revelation of
another life, and the utterance of the past is
here more perfect than anywhere else in the
world. Indeed, I think that the true friend
of Pompeii should make it a matter of con-
science, on entering the enchanted city, to
cast out of his knowledge all the rubbish that
has fallen into it from novels and travels,
and to keep merely the facts of the town's
luxurious life and agonising death, with
such incidents of the eruption as he can
remember from the description of Pliny.
These are the spells to which the sorcery

A DAY IX POMPEII. Ill

yields, and with these in your thought you
rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to
be a valet de place of the first century, and
yourselves a set of blond barbarians to
whom he is showing off the splendours of one
of the most brilliant towns of the empire of
Titus. Those sad furrows in the pavement
become vocal with the joyous rattle of
chariot -wheels on a sudden, and you
prudently step up on the narrow side-walks
and rub along by the little shops of wine,
and grain, and oil, with which the thrifty
voluptuaries of Pompeii flanked their street
doors. The counters of these shops run
across their fronts, and are pierced with
round holes on the top, through which you
see dark depths of oil in the jars below, and
not sullen lumps of ashes; those stately
amphorce behind are full of wine, and in the
corners are bags of wheat.

" This house, with a shop on either side,
whose is it, XXVI. ? "

" It is the house of the great Sallust, my
masters. Would you like his autograph?
I know one of his slaves who would sell it."

You are a good deal stared at, naturally,
as you pass by, for people in Pompeii have
not much to do, and, besides, a Briton is
not an everyday sight there, as he will be

112 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

one of these centuries. The skins of wild
beasts are little worn in Pompeii ; and those
bold-eyed Roman women think it rather
odd that we should like to powder our
shaggy heads with brick-dust. However,
these are matters of taste. We, for our
part, cannot repress a feeling of disgust at
the loungers in the street, who, XXVI.
tells us, are all going to soak themselves
half the day in the baths yonder ; for if
there is in Pompeii one thing more offensive
than another to our savage sense of
propriety, it is the personal cleanliness of
the inhabitants. We little know what a
change for the better will be wrought in
these people with the lapse of time, and
that they will yet come to wash themselves
but once a year, as we do.

(The reader may go on doing this sort of
thing at some length for himself ; and may
imagine, if he pleases, a boastful conver-
sation among the Pompeians at the baths,
in which the barbarians hear how Agricola
has broken the backbone of a rebellion in
Britain ; and in which all the speakers begin
their observations with " Ho ! nay Lepidus ! "
and " Ha ! my Diomed ! " In the meantime
we return to the present day, and step down
the Street of Plenty along with Ventisei. )

A DAY IN POMPEII. 113

III.

IT is proper, after seeing the sites of some
of the principal temples in Pompeii (such as
those of Jupiter and Venus), to cross the
fields that cover a great breadth of the
buried city, and look into the amphitheatre,
where, as everybody knows, the lions had
no stomach for Glaucus on the morning of
the fatal eruption. The fields are now
planted with cotton, and of course we
thought those commonplaces about the
wonder the Pompeians would feel could they
come back to see that New- World plant
growing above their buried homes. We
might have told them, the day of our visit,
that this cruel plant, so long watered with the
tears of slaves and fed with the blood of men,
was now an exile from its native fields, where
war was ploughing with sword and shot
the guilty land, and rooting up the subtlest
fibres of the oppression in which cotton had
grown king. And the ghosts of wicked old
Pompeii, remembering the manifold sins that
called the fires of hell to devour her, and
thinking on this exiled plant, the latest wit-
ness of God's unforgetting justice, might
well have shuddered, through all their
shadow, to feel how terribly He destroys
the enemies of Nature and man.

VOL. i. H

114 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

But the only Pompeian presence which
haunted our passage of the cotton -field were
certain small

"Phantoms of delight,"

with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who
ran before us and plucked the bolls of the
cotton and sold them to us. Embassies
bearing red and white grapes were also sent
out of, the cottages to our excellencies ; and
there was some doubt of the currency of the
coin which we gave these poor children in
return.

There are now but few peasants living on
the land over the head of Pompeii, and the
Government allows no sales of real estate to
be made except to itself. The people who
still dwell here can hardly be said to own
their possessions, for they are merely allowed
to cultivate the soil. A guard stationed
night and day prevents them from making
excavations, and they are severely restricted
from entering the excavated quarters of the
city alone.

The cotton whitens over two-thirds of
Pompeii yet interred : happy the generation
that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of
that sepulchre ! For, when you have once
been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past
takes deeper hold on your imagination than

A DAY IN POMPEII. 115

any living city, and becomes and is the
metropolis of your dreamland for ever. 0
marvellous city ! who shall reveal the
cunning of your spell ? Something not
death, something not life — something that
is the one when you turn to determine its
essence as the other ! What is it comes to
me at this distance of that which I saw in
Pompeii ? The narrow and curving, but
not crooked streets, with the blazing sun
of that Neapolitan November falling into
them, or clouding their wheel- worn lava with
the black, black shadows of the many-tinted
walls ; the houses, and the gay columns of
white, yellow, and red ; the delicate pave-
ments of mosaic ; the skeletons of dusty
cisterns and dead fountains ; inanimate gar-
den spaces with pigmy statues suited to
their littleness ; suites of fairy bed-cham-
bers, painted with exquisite frescoes ; dining -
halls with joyous scenes of hunt and banquet
on their walls ; the ruinous sites of temples ;
the melancholy emptiness of booths and
shops and jolly drinking-houses ; the lone-
some tragic theatre, with a modern Pom-
peian drawing water from a well there;
the baths with their roofs perfect yet, and
the stucco bas-reliefs all but unharmed ;
around the whole, the city wall crowned

116 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

with slender poplars ; outside the gates, the
long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way
stretching on to Stabise ; and, in the dis-
tance, Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his
fiery breath scarce visible against the cloud-
less heaven ; — these are the things that float
before my fancy as I turn back to look at
myself walking those enchanted streets, and
to wonder if I could ever have been so blest.

For there is nothing on the earth, or
under it, like Pompeii.

The amphitheatre, to which we came now,
after our stroll across the cotton-fields, was
small, like the vastest things in Pompeii,
and had nothing of the stately magnificence
of the Arena at Verona, nor anything of the
Roman Coliseum's melancholy and ruinous
grandeur. But its littleness made it all
the more comfortable and social, and, seated
upon its benches under a cool awning, one
could have almost chatted across the arena
with one's friends ; could have witnessed
the spectacle on the sands without losing
a movement of the quick gladiators, or an
agony of the victim given to the beasts —
which must have been very delightful to a
Pompeian of companionable habits and fine
feelings. It is quite impossible, however,
that tne bouts described by Bulwer as tak-

A DAY IN POMPEII. 117

ing place all at the same time 011 the arena
should really have done so ; the combatants
would have rolled and tumbled and trampled
over each other an hundred times in the
narrow space.

Of all the voices with which it once rang
the poor little amphitheatre has kept only
an echo. But this echo is one of the most
perfect ever heard : prompt, clear, startling,
it blew back the light chaff we threw to it
with amazing vehemence, and almost made
us doubt if it were not a direct human
utterance. Yet how was Ventisei to know
our names ? And there was no one else to
call them but ourselves. Our " dolce duca"
gathered a nosegay from the crumbling
ledges, and sat down in the cool of the
once -cruel cells beneath, and put it prettily
together for the ladies. When we had
wearied ourselves with the echo, he arose
and led us back into Pompeii.

IV.

THE plans of nearly all the houses in the
city are alike : the entrance-room next the
door ; the parlour or drawing-room next
that ; then the impluvium, or unroofed space
in the middle of the house, where the rains
were caught and drained into the cistern,

118 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

and where the household used to come to
wash itself, primitively, as at a pump ; the
little garden, with its painted columns, be-
hind the impluvium, and, at last, the dining-
room. There are minute bed-chambers 011
either side, and, as I said, a shop at one
side in front, for the sale of the master's
grain, wine, and oil. The pavements of all
the houses are of mosaic, which, in the
better sort, is very delicate and beautiful,
and is found sometimes perfectly uninjured.
An exquisite pattern, often repeated, is a
ground of tiny cubes of white marble with
dots of black dropped regularly into it. Of
course there were many picturesque and
fanciful designs, of which the best have been
removed to the Museum in Naples ; but
several good ones are still left, and (like that
of the Wild Boar) give names to the houses
in which they are found.

But, after all, the great wonder, the glory,
of these Pompeian houses is in their fres-
coes. If I tried to give an idea of the luxury
of colour in Pompeii, the most gorgeous
adjectives would be as poorly able to repro-
duce a vivid and glowing sense of those
hues as the photography which now copies
the drawing of the decorations ; so I do not
try.

A DAY IN POMPEII. 119

I know it is a cheap and feeble thought,
and yet, let the reader please to consider :
A workman nearly two thousand years ago
laying upon the walls those soft lines that
went to make up fauns and satyrs, nymphs
and naiads, heroes and gods and goddesses ;
and getting weary and lying down to sleep,
and dreaming of an eruption of the moun-
tain j of the city buried under a fiery hail,
and slumbering in its bed of ashes seventeen
centuries ; then of its being slowly ex-
humed, and, after another lapse of years, of
some one coming to gather the shadow of
that dreamer's work upon a plate of glass,
that he might infinitely reproduce it and sell
it to tourists at from five francs to fifty
centimes a copy — I say, consider such a
dream dreamed in the hot heart of the day,
after certain cups of Vesuvian wine ! What
a piece of Katzen jammer (I can use no
milder term) would that workman think it
when lie woke again ! Alas ! what is history
and the progress of the arts and sciences but
one long Katzenjammer !

Photography cannot give, any more than
I, the colours of the frescoes, but it can do
the drawing better, and, I suspect, the
spirit also. I used the word workman, and
not artist, in speaking of the decoration of

120 ITALIAN JOURNEYS

the walls, for in most cases the painter was
only an artisan, and did his work probably
by the yard, as the artisan who paints walls
and ceilings in Italy does at this day. But
the old workman did his work much more
skilfully and tastefully than the modern —
threw on expanses of mellow colour, deli-
cately panelled off the places for the scenes,
and pencilled in the figures and draperies
(there are usually more of the one than the
other) with a deft hand. Of course, the
houses of the rich were adorned by men of
talent ; but it is surprising to see the com-
munity of thought and feeling in all this
work, whether it be from cunninger or
clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly
always chosen from the fables of the gods,
and they are in illustration of the poets,
Homer and the rest. To suit that soft,
luxurious life which people led in Pompeii,
the themes are commonly amorous, and
sometimes not too chaste ; there is much of
Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus and
Adonis, and Diana bathes a good deal with
her nymphs, — not to mention frequent re-
presentations of the toilet of that beauti-
ful monster which the lascivious art of the
time loved to depict. One of the most pleas-
ing of all the scenes is that, in one of the

A DAY IN POMPEII. 121

houses, of the Judgment of Paris, in which
the shepherd sits upon a bank in an attitude
of ineffable and flattered importance, with
one leg carelessly crossing the other, and
both hands resting lightly on his shepherd's
crook, while the goddesses before him await
his sentence. Naturally the painter has done
his best for the victress in this rivalry, and
you see

" Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,"

as she should be, but with a warm and
piquant spice of girlish resentment in her
attitude, that Paris should pause for an in-
stant, which is altogether delicious.

" And I beheld great Here's angry eyes."
Awful eyes ! How did the painter make
them ? The wonder of all these pagan frescoes
is the mystery of the eyes — still, beautiful,
anhuman. You cannot believe that it is
wrong for those tranquil -eyed men and
women to do evil, they look so calm and so
unconscious in it all ; and in the presence of
the celestials, as they bend upon you those
eternal orbs, in whose regard you are but a
part of space, you feel that here art has
achieved the unearthly. I know of no words
in literature which give a sense (nothing gives
the idea) of the stare of these gods, except

122 ITALIAN JOUBNEYS.

that magnificent line of Kingsley's, describ-
ing the advance over the sea toward Andro-
meda of the oblivious and unsympathising
Nereids. They floated slowly up, and their
eyes

" Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the
house of the idols."

The colours of this fresco of the Judgment
of Paris are still so fresh and bright, that it
photographs very well, but there are other
frescoes wherein there is more visible perfec-
tion of line, but in which the colours are so
dim that they can only be reproduced by
drawings. One of these is the Wounded
Adonis cared for by Venus and the Loves ;
in which the story is treated with a playful
pathos wonderfully charming. The fair boy
leans in the languor of his hurt toward Venus,
who sits utterly disconsolate beside him,
while the Cupids busy themselves with such
slight surgical offices as Cupids may render :
one prepares a linen bandage for the wound,
another wraps it round the leg of Adonis,
another supports one of his heavy arms,
another finds his emotions too much for him
and pauses to weep. It is a pity that the
colours of this beautiful fresco are grown so
dim, and a greater pity that most of the other
frescoes in Pompeii must share its fate, and

A DAY IX POMPEII. 123

fade away. The hues are vivid when the walls
are first uncovered, and the ashes washed
from the pictures, but then the malice of the
elements begins anew, and rain and sun draw
the life out of tints which the volcano failed
to obliterate. In nearly all cases they could
be preserved by throwing a roof above the
walls, and it is a wonder that the Govern-
ment does not take this slight trouble to save
them.

Among the frescoes which told no story but
their own, we were most pleased with one
in a delicately painted little bed-chamber.
This represented an alarmed and furtive man,
whom we at once pronounced The Belated
Husband, opening a door with a night-latch.
Nothing could have been better than this
miserable wretch's cowardly haste and cau-
tious noiselessness in applying his key ;
apprehension sat upon his brow, confusion
dwelt in his guilty eye. He had been out
till two o'clock in the morning, electioneering
for Pansa, the friend of the people (" Pansa,
and Roman gladiators," " Pansa, and Chris-
iians to the Beasts," was the platform), and
he had left his placens uxor at home alone
with the children, and now within this door
that placens uxor awaited him !

124 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

V.

You have read, no doubt, of their dis-
covering, a year or two since, in making an
excavation in a Pompeian street, the moulds
of four human bodies, three women and a
man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in
the storm of fire eighteen hundred years ago ;
whose shape the settling and hardening ashes
took ; whose flesh wasted away, and whose
bones lay there in the hollow of the matrix
till the cunning of this time found them,
and, pouring liquid plaster round the skele-
tons, clothed them with human form again,
and drew them forth into the world once more.
There are many things in Pompeii which
bring back the gay life of the city, but
nothing which so vividly reports the terrible
manner of her death as these effigies of the
creatures that actually shared it. The man
in the last struggle has thrown himself upon
his back, and taken his doom sturdily — there
is a sublime calm in his rigid figure. The
women lie upon their faces, their limbs tossed
and distorted, their drapery tangled and
heaped about them, and in every fibre you
see how hard they died. One presses her
face into her handkerchief to draw one last
breath unmixed with scalding steam; an-

A DAY IN POMPEII. 125

other's arms are wildly thrown abroad to
clutch at help ; another's hand is appealiiigly
raised, and on her slight fingers you see the
silver hoops with which her poor dead vanity
adorned them.

The guide takes you aside from the street
into the house where they lie, and a dreadful
shadow drops upon your heart as you enter
their presence. Without, the hell-storm
seems to fall again, and the whole sunny
plain to be darkened with its ruin, and the
city to send up the tumult of her despair.

What is there left in Pompeii to speak of
after this ? The long street of tombs outside
the walls ? Those that died before the city's
burial seem to have scarcely a claim to the
solemnity of death.

Shall we go see Diomed's Villa, and walk
through the freedman's long underground
vaults, where his friends thought to be safe,
and were smothered in heaps ? The garden-
ground grows wild among its broken columns
with weeds and poplar saplings; in one of
the corridors they sell photographs, on which,
if you please, Ventisei has his bottle, or
drink-money. So we escape from the doom
of the calamity, and so, at last, the severely
forbidden buonamano is paid. A dog may
die many deaths besides choking with butter.

126 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

We return slowly through the city, where
we have spent the whole day, from nine
till four o'clock. We linger on the way,
imploring Ventisei if there is not something
to be seen in this or that house ; we make
our weariness an excuse for sitting down,
and cannot rend ourselves from the bliss of
being in Pompeii.

At last we leave its gates, and swear each
other to come again many times while in
Naples, and never go again.

Perhaps it was as well. You cannot
repeat great happiness.

A HALF-HOCE AT HERCULAXEUM. 127

IX.

A HALF-HOUR AT HERCTJLANEUM.

THE road from Naples to Herculaneum is,
in fact, one long street ; it hardly
ceases to be city in Naples till it is town at
Portici, and in the interval it is suburb,
running between palatial lines of villas,
which all have their names ambitiously
painted over their doors. Great part of the
distance this street is bordered by the bay,
and, as far as this is the case, it is pictur-
esque, as everything is belonging to marine
life in Italy. Seafaring people go lounging
up and down among the fishermen's boats
drawn up on the shore, and among the
fishermen's wives making nets, while the
fishermen's children play and clamber every-
where, and over all flap and flutter . the
clothes hung on poles to dry. In this part
of the street there are, of course, oysters,
and grapes, and oranges, and cactus-pulps,
and cutlery, and iced drinks to sell at

]28 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

various booths ; and Commerce is exceed-
ingly dramatic and boisterous over the
bargains she offers ; and equally, of course,
murderous drinking- shops lurk at intervals
along the pavement, and lure into their
recesses mariners of foreign birth, briefly
ashore from their ships. The New York
Coffee-House is there to attract my maritime
fellow-countrymen, and I know that if I
look into that place of refreshment I shall
see their honest, foolish faces flushed with
drink, and with the excitement of buying
the least they can for the most money. Poor
souls ! they shall drink that pleasant morn-
ing away in the society of Antonino, the best
of Neapolitans, and at midnight, emptied of
every soldo, shall arise, wrung with a fearful
suspicion of treachery, and wander away
under Antonino's guidance to seek the pro-
tection of the Consul ; or, taking the law
into their own hands, shall proceed to clean
out, more Americano, the New York Coffee-
House, when Antonino shall develop into
one of the landlords, and deal them the
most artistic stab in Naples : handsome,
worthy Antonino ; tender-eyed, subtle,
pitiless !

A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 129
II.

WHERE the road to Herculaneum leaves
the bay and its seafaring life, it enters,
between the walls of lofty, fly-blown houses,
a world of maccaroni haunted by foul
odours, beggars, poiiltry, and insects. There
were few people to be seen on the street,
but through the open doors of the lofty fly-
blown houses we saw floury legions at work
making maccaroni ; grinding maccaroni, roll-
ing it, cutting it, hanging it in mighty
skeins to dry, and gathering it when dried,
and putting it away. By the frequency of
the wine-shops we judged that the legions
were a thirsty host, and, by the number of
the barber-surgeons' shops, that they were
a plethoric and too full-blooded host. The
latter shops were in the proportion of one to
five of the former ; and the artist who had
painted their signs had indulged his fancy
in wild excesses of phlebotomy. We had
found that, as we came south from Venice,
science grew more and more sanguinary in
Italy, and more and more disposed to let
blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity
began to be manifest on the barbers' signs,
which displayed the device of an arm lanced
at the elbow, and jetting the blood by a

VOL. I. I

130 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

neatly described curve into a tumbler.
Further south the same arm was seen to
bleed at the wrist also ; and at Naples
an exhaustive treatment of the subject
appeared, the favourite study of the artist
being to represent a nude figure reclining in
a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant
greensward, and bleeding from the elbows,
wrists, hands, ankles, and feet.

in.

IN Naples everywhere one is surprised by
the great number of English names which
appear on business houses, but it was en-
tirely bewildering to read a bill affixed to
the gate of one of the villas on this road :
"This Desirable Property for Sale." I
should scarcely have cared to buy that
desirable property, though the neighbour-
hood seemed to be a favourite summer
resort, and there were villas, as I said,
nearly the whole way to Portici. Those
which stood with their gardens toward the
bay would have been tolerable, no doubt, if
they could have kept their windows shut to
the vile street before their doors ; but the
houses opposite could have had 110 escape
from its stench and noisomeness. It was

A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEFM. 131

absolutely the filthiest street I have seen
anywhere outside of New York, excepting
only that little street which, in Hercu-
laneum, leads from the theatre to the House
of Argo.

This pleasant avenue has a stream of
turbid water in its centre, bordered by
begging children, and is either fouler or
cleaner for the water, but I shall never know
which. It is at a depth of some fifty or
sixty feet below the elevation on which the
present city of Portici is built, and is part
of the excavation made long ago to reach
the plain on which Herculaneum stands,
buried under its half-score of successive
layers of lava, and ashes, and Portici. We
had the aid of all the virtuous poverty and
leisure of the modern town — there was a
vast deal of both, we found — in our search
.for the staircase by which you descend to
the classic plain, and it proved a discovery
involving the outlay of all the copper coin
about us, while the sight of the famous
theatre of Herculaneum was much more
expensive than it would have been had we
come there in the old time to see a play of
Plautus or Terence.

As for the theatre, " the large and highly
ornamented theatre " of which I read, only

132 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

a little while ago, in an encyclopaedia, we
found it by the light of our candles, a series
of gloomy hollows, of the general complexion
of coal-bins and potato-cellars. It was never
perfectly dug out of the lava, and, as is
known, it was filled up in the last century,
together with other excavations, when they
endangered the foundations of worthless
Portici overhead. (I am amused to find
myself so hot upon the poor property-holders
of Portici. I suppose I should not myself,
even for the cause of antiquity and the
knowledge of classic civilisation, like to
have my house tumbled about my ears.)
But though it was impossible in the theatre
of Herculaneum to gain any idea of its size
or richness, I remembered there the mag-
nificent bronzes which had been found in it,
and did a hasty reverence to the place.
Indeed, it is amazing, when one sees how
small a part of Herculaneum has been un-
covered, to consider the number of fine
works of art in the Museo Borbonico which
were taken thence, and which argue a much
richer and more refined community than
that of Pompeii. A third of the latter city
lias now been restored to the light of day ;
but though it has yielded abundance of all
the things that illustrate the domestic and

A HALF-HOUR AT HEKCULANEUM. 133

public life, and the luxury and depravity of
those old times, and has given the once
secret rooms of the museum their worst
attraction, it still falls far below Hercu-
laneum hi the value of its contributions to
the treasures of classic art, except only in
the variety and beauty of its exquisite
frescoes.

The effect of this fact is to stimulate the
imagination of the visitor to that degree
that nothing short of the instant destruction
of Portici and the excavation of all Hercu-
laneum will satisfy him. If the opening of
one theatre, and the uncovering of a basilica
and two or three houses, have given such
richness to us, what delight and knowledge
would not the removal of these obdurate
hills of ashes and lava bestow !

Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-
cellars, the visitor extinguishes his candle
with a pathetic sigh, profusely rewards the
custodian (whom he connects in some
mysterious way with the ancient population
of the injured city about him), and, thought-
fully removing the tallow from his fmgei-s,
follows the course of the vile stream already
sung, and soon arrives at the gate opening
into the exhumed quarter of Herculaneum.
And there he finds a custodian who enters

134 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

perfectly into his feelings ; a custodian who
has once been a guide in Pompeii, but now
despises that wretched town, and would not
be guide there for any money since he has
known the superior life of Herculaneum ;
who, in fine, feels toward Pompeii as a
Bostonian feels toward New York. Yet the
reader would be wrong to form the idea
that there is bitterness in the disdain of
this custodian. On the contrary, he is one
of the best-natured men in the world. He
is a mighty mass of pinguid bronze, with a
fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, and
he lectures us with a vast and genial breadth
of manner on the ruins, contradicting all our
guesses at things with a sweet " Perdoni,
signori ! ma — ." At the end, we find that
he has some medallions of lava to sell :
there is Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of
the partito d'azione, there is Garibaldi ;
both warm yet from the crater of Vesuvius,
and of the same material which destroyed
Herculaneum. We decline to buy, and the
custodian makes the national shrug and
grimace (signifying that we are masters of
the situation, and that he washes his hands
of the consequence of our folly) on the
largest scale that we have ever seen : his
mighty hands are rigidly thrust forth, his

A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 135

great lip protruded, his enormous head
thrown back to bring his face on a level
with his chin. The effect is tremendous,
but we nevertheless feel that he loves us
the same.

THE afternoon on which we visited
Herculaneum was in melancholy contrast to
the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering
summer had at last saddened into something
like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue
sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second
draught of the spirit of the past had not
only something of the insipidity of custom,
but brought rather a depression than a light-
ness to our hearts. There was so little of
Herculaneum : only a few hundred yards
square are exhumed, and we counted the
houses easily on the fingers of one hand,
leaving the thumb to stand for the few
rods of street that, with its flagging of lava
and narrow border of foot-walks, lay
between ; and though the custodian, appa-
rently moved at our dejection, said that the
excavation was to be resumed the very next
week, the assurance did little to restore our
cheerfulness. Indeed, I fancy that these
old cities must needs be seen in the sunshine

136 ITALIAN' JOURNEYS.

by those who would feel what gay lives
they once led ; by dimmer light they are
very sullen spectres, and their doom still
seems to brood upon them. I know that
even Pompeii could not have been joyous
that sunless afternoon, for what there was
to see of mournful Herculaneum was as
brilliant with colours as anything in the
former city. Nay, I believe that the tints
of the frescoes and painted columns were even
brighter, and that the walls of the houses
were far less ruinous than those of Pompeii.
But no house was wholly freed from lava,
and the little street ran at the rear of the
buildings which were supposed to front on
some grander avenue not yet exhumed. It
led down, as the custodian pretended, to a
wharf, and he showed an iron ring in the
wall of the House of Argo, standing at the
end of the street, to which, he said, his
former fellow-citizens used to fasten their
boats, though it was all dry enough there
now. There is evidence in Herculaneum of
much more ambitious domestic architecture
than seems to have been known in Pompeii.
The ground-plan of the houses in the two
cities is alike ; but in the former there was
often a second story, as was proven by the
charred ends of beams still protruding from

A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 137

the walls, while in the latter there is only
one house which is thought to have aspired
to a second floor. The House of Argo is also
much larger than any in Pompeii, and its
appointments were more magnificent. In-
deed, we imagined that in this more purely
Greek town we felt an atmosphere of better
taste in everything than prevailed in the
fashionable Roman watering-place, though
this, too, was a summer resort of the " best
society " of the empire. The mosaic pave-
ments were exquisite, and the little bed-
chambers dainty and delicious in their
decorations. The lavish delight in colour
found expression in the vividest hues upon
the walls ; and not only were the columns
of the garden painted, but the foliage of the
capitals was variously tinted. The garden
of the House of Argo was vaster than any of
the classic world which we had yet seen, and
was superb with a long colonnade of unbroken
columns. Between these and the walls of
the houses was a pretty pathway of mosaic,
and in the midst once stood marble tables,
under which the workmen exhuming the city
found certain crouching skeletons. At one
end was the dining-room, of course, and
painted on the wall was a lady with a
parasol.

138 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

I thought all Herculaneum sad enough,
but the profusion of flowers growing wild in
this garden gave it a yet more tender and
pathetic charm. Here — where so long ago
the flowers had bloomed, and perished in the
terrible blossoming of the mountain that
sent up its fires in the awful similitude
of Nature's harmless and lovely forms, and
showered its destroying petals all abroad —
was it not tragic to find again the soft tints,
the graceful shapes, the sweet perfumes of
the earth's immortal life ? Of them that
planted and tended and plucked and bore in
their bosoms and twined in their hair these
fragile children of the summer, what witness
in the world-? Only the crouching skeletons
under the tables. Alas and alas !

v.

The skeletons went with us throughout
Herculaneum, and descended into the cell,
all green with damp, under the basilica, and
lay down, fettered and manacled in the place
of those found there beside the big bronze
kettle in which the prisoners used to cook
their dinners. How ghastly the thought of
it was ! If we had really seen this kettle
and the skeletons there — as we did not — we
could not have suffered more than we did.

A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM. 139

They took all the life out of the House of
Perseus, and the beauty from his pretty little
domestic temple to the Penates, and this was
all there was left in Herculaneum to see.

"Is there nothing else?" we demand of
the custodian.

" Signori, this is all."

"It is mighty little."

" Perdoni, signori ! ma — ."

" Well," we say sourly to each other,
glancing round at the walls of the pit, on the
bottom of which the bit of city stands, "it
is a good thing to know that Herculaneum
amounts to nothing."

140 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

X.

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES.

T HAVE no doubt

" Calm Capri waits,"

where we left it, in the Gulf of Salerno, for
any traveller who may choose to pay it a visit ;
but at the time we were there we felt that it
was on exhibition for that day only, and
would, when we departed, disappear in its
sapphire sea, and be no more ; just as Niagara
ceases to play as soon as your back is turned,
and Venice goes out like a pyrotechnic dis-
play, and all marvellously grand and lovely
things make haste to prove their impennan-
ence.

We delayed some days in Naples in hopes
of fine weather, and at last chose a morning
that was warm and cloudy at nine o'clock,
and burst into frequent passions of rain be-
fore we reached Sorrento at noon. The first
half of the journey was made by rail, and
brought us to Castellamare, whence we took

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 141

carriage for Sorrento, and oranges and rap-
ture,— winding along the steep shore of the
sea, and under the brows of wooded hills
that rose high above us into the misty
weather, and caught here and there the sun-
shine on their tops. In that heavenly
climate no day can long be out of humour,
and at Sorrento we found ours very pleasant,
and rode delightedly through the devious
streets, looking up to the terraced orange -
groves on one hand, and down to the ter-
raced orange-groves on the other, until at a
certain turning of the way we encountered
Antonino Occhio d'Argento, whom fate had
appointed to be our boatman to Capri. We
had never heard of Antonino before, and
indeed had intended to take a boat from one
of the hotels ; but when this corsair offered
us his services, there was that guile in his
handsome face, that cunning in his dark
eyes, that heart could not resist, and we
halted our carriage and took him at once.

He kept his boat in one of those caverns
which honeycomb the cliff under Sorrento,
and afford a natural and admirable shelter
for such small craft as may be dragged up
out of reach of the waves, and here I bar-
gained with him before finally agreeing to
go with him to Capri. In Italy it is cus-

142 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

ternary for a public carrier when engaged to
give his employer as a pledge the sum agreed
upon for his service, which is returned with
the amount due him, at the end, if the
service has been satisfactory ; and I de-
manded of Antonino this caparra, as it is
called. " What caparra?" said he, lifting
the lid of his wicked eye with his forefinger,
"this is the best caparra," meaning a face
as honest and trustworthy as the devil's.
The stroke confirmed my subjection to An-
tonino, and I took his boat without further
parley, declining even to feel the muscle of
his boatmen's arms, which he exposed to my
touch in evidence that they were strong
enough to row us swiftly to Capri. The
men were but two in number, but they
tossed the boat lightly into the surf, and
then lifted me aboard, and rowed to the
little pier from which the ladies and T. got
in.

The sun shone, the water danced and
sparkled, and presently we raised our sail,
and took the gale that blew for Capri — an
oblong height rising ten miles beyond out of
the heart of the azure gulf. On the way
thither there was little interest but that of
natural beaiity in the bold, picturesque
coast we skirted for some distance ; though

CAPRI AND CAPBIOTES 143

on one mighty rock there were the ruins of
a seaward-looking Temple of Hercules, with
arches of the unmistakable Roman masonry,
below which the receding waves rushed and
poured over a jetting ledge in a thunderous
cataract.

Antonino did his best to entertain us, and
lectured us unceasingly upon his virtue and
his wisdom, dwelling greatly on the pro-
priety and good policy of always speaking
the truth. This spectacle of veracity be-
came intolerable after a while, and I was
goaded to say : " Oh, then, if you never tell
lies, you expect to go to Paradise." "Not
at all," answered Antonino compassionately,
" for I have sinned much. But the lie
doesn't go ahead " (non va avanti), added
this Machiavelli of boatmen ; yet I think
he was mistaken, for he deceived us with
perfect ease and admirable success. All
along, he had pretended that \ve could see
Capri, visit the Blue Grotto, and return
that day ; but as we drew near the island,
painful doubts began to trouble him, and he
feared the sea would be too rough for the
Grotto part of the affair. " But there will
be an old man," he said, with a subtile air
of prophecy, " waiting for us on the beach.
This old man is one of the Government

144 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

guides to the Grotto, and he will say
whether it is to be seen to-day."

And certainly there was the old man 011
the beach — a short patriarch, with his bald-
ness covered by a kind of bloated woollen
sock — a blear-eyed sage, and a bare-legged.
He waded through the surf toward the boat,
and when we asked him whether the Grotto
was to be seen, he paused knee-deep in the
water (at a secret signal from Antonino, as I
shall always believe), put on a face of ten-
der solemnity, threw back his head a little,
brought his hand to his cheek, expanded it,
and said, "No; to-day, no! To-morrow,
yes ! " Antonino leaped joyously ashore,
and delivered us over to the old man, to be
guided to the Hotel di Londra, while he
drew his boat up on the land. He had
reason to be contented, for this artifice of
the patriarch of Capri relieved him from the
necessity of verifying to me the existence of
an officer of extraordinary powers in the
nature of a consul, who, he said, would not
permit boats to leave Capri for the main-
land after five o'clock in the evening.

When it was decided that we should re-
main on the island till the morrow, we found
so much time on our hands, after bargain-
ing for our lodging at the Hotel di Londra,

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 145

that we resolved to ascend the mountain
to the ruins of the palaces of Tiberius, and
to this end we contracted for the services of
certain of the muletresses that had gathered
about the inn-gate, clamorously offering their
beasts. The muletresses chosen were a ma-
tron of mature years and of a portly habit
of body ; her daughter, a mere child ; and
her niece, a very pretty girl of eighteen,
with a voice soft and sweet as a bird's.
They placed the ladies, one on each mule,
and then, while the mother and daughter
devoted themselves to the hind-quarters of
the foremost animal, the lovely niece brought
up the rear of the second beast, and the
patriarch went before, and T. and I trudged
behind. So the cavalcade ascended ; first,
from the terrace of the hotel overlooking
the bit of shipping village on the beach, and
next from the town of Capri, clinging to
the hill-sides, midway between sea and sky,
until at last it reached the heights on which
the ruins stand. Our way was through
narrow lanes, bordered by garden walls ;
then through narrow streets bordered by
dirty houses ; and then again by gardens,
but now of a better sort than the first, and
belonging to handsome villas.

On the road our pretty muletress gossiped
VOL. i. K

146 ITALIAN JOURXEYS.

cheerfully, and our patriarch gloomily, and
between the two we accumulated a store of
information concerning the present inhabi-
tants of Capri, which, I am sorry to say,
has now for the most part failed me. I
remember that they said most of the land-
owners at Capri were Neapolitans, and that
these villas were their country houses ;
though they pointed out one of the state-
liest of the edifices as belonging to a certain
English physician who had come to visit
Capri for a few days, and had now been
living on the island twenty years, having
married (said the muletress) the prettiest
and poorest girl in the town. From this
romance — something like which the mule-
tress seemed to think might well happen
conceniing herself — we passed lightly to
speak of kindred things, the muletress re-
sponding gaily between the blows she be-
stowed upon her beast. The accent of these
Capriotes has something of German harsh-
ness and heaviness : they say non bosso
instead of non posso, and monto instead of
mondo, and interchange the t and d a good
deal ; and they use for father the Latin
pater, instead of padre. But this girl's
voice, as I said, was very musical, and the
island's accent was sweet upon her tongue.

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 147

/. — What is your name ?

She. — Caterina, little sir (siynorin).

I. — And how old are you, Caterina?

She. — Eighteen, little sir.

/. — And you are betrothed .

She feigns not to understand ; but the
patriarch, who has dropped behind to listen
to our discourse, explains — " He asks if you
are in love."

She. — Ah, no ! little sir, not yet.

/.—No? A little late, it seems to me.
I think there must be some good-looking
youngster who pleases you — no ?

She. — Ah, no ! one must work, one cannot
think of marrying. We are four sisters, and
we have only the buonamano from hiring
these mules, and we must spin and cook.

The Patriarch. — Don't believe her; she
has two lovers.

She. — All, no ! It isn't true. He tells a
fib— he !

But, nevertheless, she seemed to love to
be accused of lovers, — such is the guile of
the female heart in Capri, — and laughed
over the patriarch's wickedness. She con-
fided that she ate maccaroui once a day,
and she talked constantly of eating it just
as the Northern Italians always talk of
polenta. She was a true daughter of the

148 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

isle, and had never left it but once in her
life, when she went to Naples. " Naples
was beautiful, yes ; but one always loves
one's own country the best." She was very
attentive and good, but at the end was
rapacious of more and more buonamano.
" Have patience with her, sir," said the
blameless Antonino, who witnessed her
greediness ; " they do not understand cer-
tain matters here, poor little things ! "

As for the patriarch, he was full of learn-
ing relative to himself and to Capri ; and
told me with much elaboration that the
islanders lived chiefly by fishing, and gained
something also by their vineyards. But
they were greatly oppressed by taxes, and
the strict enforcement of the conscriptions,
and they had little love for the Italian
Government, and wished the Bourbons back
again. The Piedmoiitese, indeed, misgov-
erned them horribly. There was the Blue
Grotto, for example ; formerly travellers
paid the guides five, six, ten francs for
viewing it; but now the Piedmontese had
made a tariff, and the poor guides could
only exact a franc from each person. Things,
were in a ruinous condition.

By this we had arrived at a little inn on
the top of the mountain, very near the

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 149

ruins of the palaces. " Here," said the patri-
arch, "it is customary for strangers to
drink a bottle of the wine of Tiberius."
We obediently entered the hostelry, and
the landlord — a white-toothed, brown-faced,
good-humoured peasant — gallantly ran for-
ward and presented the ladies with bouquets
of roses. We thought it a pretty and grace-
ful act, but found later that it was to be
paid for, like all pretty and graceful things
in Italy ; for when we came to settle for the
wine, and the landlord wanted more than
justice, he urged that he had presented the
ladies with flowers, — yet he equally gave me
his benediction when I refused to pay for
his politeness.

' ' Now here, " again said the patriarch in
a solemn whisper, "you can see the Taran-
tella danced for two francs ; whereas down
at your inn, if you hire the dancers through
your landlord, it will cost you five or six
francs." The difference was tempting, and
decided us in favour of an immediate Taran-
tella. The rnuletresses left their beasts to
browse about the door of the inn, and came
into the little public room, where were
already the wife and sister of the landlord,
and took their places vis-a-vis, while the
landlord seized his tambourine and beat

150 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

from it a wild and lively measure. The
women were barefooted and hoopless, and
they gave us the Tarantella with all the
beauty of natural movement and free float-
ing drapery, and with all that splendid
grace of pose which animates the antique
statues and pictures of dancers. They
swayed themselves in time with the music ;
then, filled with its passionate impulse, ad-
vanced and retreated and whirled away ; —
snapping their fingers above their heads,
and looking over their shoulders with a gay
and a laughing challenge to each other, they
drifted through the ever-repeated figures of
flight and wooing, and wove for us pictures
of delight that remained upon the brain like
the effect of long-pondered vivid colours,
and still return to illumine and complete
any representation of that indescribable
dance. Heaven knows what peril there
might have been in the beauty and grace
of the pretty rnuletress but for the spectacle
of her fat aunt, who, I must confess, could
only burlesque some of her niece's airiest
movements, and whose hard-bought buoy-
ancy was at once pathetic and laughable.
She earned her share of the spoils certainly,
and she seemed glad when the dance was
over, and went contentedly back to her mule.

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 151

The patriarch had early retired from the
scene as from a vanity with which he was
too familiar for enjoyment, and I found him,
when the Tarantella was done, leaning on the
curb of the precipitous rock immediately
behind the inn, over which the Capriotes say
Tiberius used to cast the victims of his plea-
sures after he was sated with them. These
have taken their place in the insular imagina-
tion as Christian martyrs, though it is pro-
bable that the poor souls were anything but
Nazarenes. It took a stone thrown from
the brink of the rock twenty seconds to
send back a response from the water below,
and the depth was too dizzying to look into.
So we looked instead toward Amalfi, across
the Gulf of Salerno, and toward Naples,
across her bay. On every hand the sea was
flushed with sunset, and an unspeakable
calm dwelt upon it, while the heights rising
from it softened and softened in the dis-
tance, and withdrew themselves into dreams
of ghostly solitude and phantom city. His
late majesty the Emperor Tiberius is well
known to have been a man of sentiment,
and he may often have sought this spot to
enjoy the evening hour. It was convenient
to his palace, and he could here give a fillip
to his jaded sensibilities by popping a boon

152 ITALIAN" JOURNEYS.

companion over the cliff, and thus enjoy the
fine poetic contrast which his perturbed and
horrible spirit afforded to that scene of inno-
cence and peace. Later he may have come
hither also, when lust failed, when all the
lewd plays and devices of his fancy palled
upon his senses, when sin had grown insipid,
and even murder ceased to amuse, and his
majesty uttered his despair to the Senate in
that terrible letter : " What to write to you,
or how to write, I know not : and what not
to write at this time, may all the gods and
goddesses torment me more than I daily feel
that I suffer if I do know."

The poor patriarch was also a rascal in his
small way, and he presently turned to me
with a countenance full of cowardly trouble
and base remorse. "I pray you, little sir,
not to tell the landlord below there that you
have seen the Tarantella danced here ; for
he has daughters and friends to dance it for
strangers, and gets a deal of money by it.
So, if he asks you to see it, do me the
pleasure to say, lest he should take on
(pifjllarsi) with me about it : ' Thanks, but
we saw the Tarantella at Pompeii ! '" It
was the last place in Italy where we were
likely to have peen the Tarantella ; but
these simple people are improvident in lying,
as in everything else.

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 153

The patriarch had a curious spice of
malice in him, which prompted him to speak
evil of all, and to as many as he dared.
After we had inspected the ruins of the
emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of a
woman, professing to be the wife of the
peasant who had made the excavations,
came forth out of a cleft in the rock and re-
ceived tribute of us — why, I do not know.
The patriarch abetted the extortion, but
Parthianly remarked, as we turned away,
" Her husband ought to be here ; but this is
a festa, and he is drinking and gaming in
the village," while the woman protested
that he was sick at home. There was also
a hermit living in great publicity among the
ruins, and the patriarch did not spare him a
sneering comment.1 He had even a bad
word for Tiberius, and reproached the em-
peror for throwing people over the cliff,
though I think it a sport in which he would
himself have liked to join. The only human
creatures with whom he seemed to be in
sympathy were the brigands of the main-

i This hermit, I have heard, was not brought up to
the profession of anchorite, but was formerly a shoe-
maker, and, according to his own confession, aban-
doned his trade because he could better indulge a
lethargic habit in the character of religious recluse.

154 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

land, of whom he spoke poetically as exiles
and fugitives.

As for the palace of Tiberius, which we
had come so far and so toilsomely to see, it
must be confessed there was very little left
of it. When that well-meaning but mis-
taken prince died, the Senate demolished his
pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only those
fragments of the beautiful brick masonry
which yet remain, clinging indestructible to
the rocks, and strewing the ground with
rubbish. The recent excavations have dis-
covered nothing besides the uninteresting
foundations of the building, except a subter-
ranean avenue leading from one part of the
palace to another : this is walled with deli-
cate brickwork, and exquisitely paved with
white marble mosaic ; and this was all that
witnessed of the splendour of the wicked
emperor. Nature, the all-forgetting, all-
forgiving, that takes the red battle-field into
her arms and hides it with blossom and har-
vest, could not remember his iniquity, greater
than the multitudinous murder of war. The
sea, which the despot's lust and fear had
made so lonely, slept with the white sails of
boats secure upon its breast : the little bays
and inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells,
had forgotten their desecration ; and the

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 155

gathering twilight, the sweetness of the
garden -bordered pathway, and the serenity
of the lonely landscape, helped us to doubt
history.

We slowly returned to the inn by the
road we had ascended, noting again the
mansion of the surprising Englishman who
had come to Capri for three months and had
remained thirty years ; passed through the
darkness of the village, — dropped here and
there with the vivid red of a lamp, — and so
reached the inn at last, where we found the
landlord ready to have the Tarantella danced
for us. We framed a discreeter fiction than
that prepared for us by the patriarch, and
went in to dinner, where there were two
Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many
rogues of boatmen, who, having contracted to
take them back that night to Naples, were
now trying to fly their bargain and remain
in Capri till the morrow. The Danes beat
them, however, and then sat down to dinner,
and to long stories of the imposture and vil-
lainy of the Italians. One of them chiefly
bewailed himself that the day before, hav-
ing unwisely eaten a dozen oysters without
agreeing first with the oysterman upon the
price, he had been obliged to pay this scamp's
extortionate demand to the full, since he

156 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

was unable to restore him his property.
We thought that something like this might
have happened to an imprudent man in any
country, but we did not the less join him in
abusing the Italians — the purpose for which
foreigners chiefly visit Italy.

STANDING on the height among the ruins
of Tiberius's palace, the patriarch had looked
out over the waters, and predicted for the
morrow the finest weather that had ever been
known in that region ; but in spite of this
prophecy the day dawned stormily, and at
breakfast-time we looked out doubtfully on
waves lashed by driving rain. The entrance
to the Blue Grotto, to visit which we had
come to Capri, is by a semicircular opening,
some three feet in width and two feet in
height, and just large enough to admit a
small boat. One lies flat in the bottom of
this, waits for the impulse of a beneficent
wave, and is carried through the mouth of
the cavern, and rescued from it in like man-
ner by some receding billow. When the
wind is in the wrong quarter, it is impossible
to enter the grotto at all ; and we waited
till nine o'clock for the storm to abate before
we ventured forth. In the meantime one of

CAPRI AND CAPBIOTES. 157

the Danish gentlemen, who — after assisting
his companion to compel the boatmen to jus-
tice the night before — had stayed at Capri,
and had risen early to see the grotto, returned
from it, and we besieged him with a hundred
questions concerning it. But he preserved
the wise silence of the boy who goes in to
see the six-legged calf, and comes out imper-
vious to the curiosity of all the boys who are
doubtful whether the monster is worth their
money. Our Dane would merely say that it
was now possible to visit the Blue Grotto ;
that he had seen it ; that he was glad he had
seen it. As to its blueness, Messieurs — yes,
it is blue. C'est cl dire ....

The ladies had been amusing themselves
with a perusal of the hotel register, and the
notes of admiration or disgust with which
the different sojourners at the inn had filled
it. As a rule, the English people found fault
with the poor little hostelry and the French
people praised it. Commander Joshing and
Lieutenant Prattent, R.N., of the former
nation, ' were cheated by the donkey- women,
and thought themselves extremely fortunate
to have escaped with their lives from the
effects of Capri vintage. The landlord was
an old Cossack." On the other hand, we
read, "J. Cruttard, homme de lettres, a

158 ITALIAX JOURNEYS.

passe" quinze jours ici, et n'a eu que des
felicity's du patron de cet hotel et de sa
famille." Cheerful man of letters ! His
good-natured record will keep green a name
little known to literature. Who are G.
Bradshaw, Duke of New York, and Signori
Jones and Andrews, Hereditary Princes of
the United States ? Their patrician names
followed the titles of several English nobles
in the register. But that which most inter-
ested the ladies in this record was the warn-
ing of a terrified British matron against any
visit to the Blue Grotto except in the very
calmest weather. The British matron penned
her caution after an all but fatal experience.
The ladies read it aloud to us, and announced
that for themselves they would be contented
with pictures of the Blue Grotto and our
account of its marvels.

On the beach below the hotel lay the small
boats of the guides to the Blue Grotto, and
we descended to take one of them. The fixed
rate is a franc for each person. The boatmen
wanted five francs for each of us. We ex-
plained that although not indigenous to
Capri, or even Italy, we were not of the suc-
culent growth of travellers, and would not
be eaten. We retired to our vantage-ground
on the heights. The guides called us to the

CAPKI AND CAPRIOTES. 159

beach again. They would take us for three
francs apiece, or say six francs for both of
us. We withdrew furious to the heights
again, where we found honest Antonino, who
did us the pleasure to yell to his fellow-
scoundrels on the beach, " You had better
take these signori for a just price. They are
going to the syndic to complain of you."
At which there arose a lamentable outcry
among the boatmen, and they called with
one voice for us to come down and go for a
franc apiece. This fable teaches that com-
mon carriers are rogues everywhere ; but
that whereas we are helpless in their hands
at home, we may bully them into rectitude
in Italy, where they are afraid of the law.

We had scarcely left the landing of the
hotel in the boat of the patriarch — for I need
hardly say he was first and most rapacious
of the plundering crew — when we found our-
selves in very turbulent waters, in the face
of mighty bluffs, rising inaccessible from the
sea. Here and there, where their swarthy
fronts were softened with a little verdure,
goat-paths wound up and down among the
rocks ; and midway between the hotel and
the grotto, in a sort of sheltered nook, we
saw the Roman masonry of certain antique
baths — baths of Augustus, says Yalery ;

160 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

baths of Tiberius, say the Capriotes, zealous
for the honour of their infamous hero. How-
beit, this was all we saw on the way to the
Blue Grotto. Every moment the waves rose
higher, emulous of the bluffs, which would
not have afforded a foothold, or anything to
cling to, had we been upset and washed
against them — and we began to talk of the
immortality of the soul. As we neared the
grotto, the patriarch entertained us with
stories of the perilous adventures of people
who insisted upon entering it in stormy
weather, — especially of a French painter who
had been imprisoned in it four days, and
kept alive only on rum, which the patriarch
supplied him, swimming into the grotto
with a bottleful at a time. "And behold us
arrived, gentlemen ! " said he, as he brought
the boat skilfully around in front of the
small semicircular opening at the base of the
lofty bluff. We lie flat on the bottom of the
boat, and complete the immersion of that
part of our clothing which the driving tor-
rents of rain had spared. The wave of
destiny rises with us upon its breast — sinks,
and we are inside of the Blue Grotto. Not
so much blue as grey, however, and the
water about the mouth of it green rather
than azure. They say that on a sunny day

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES. 161

both the water and the roof of the cavern are
of the vividest cerulean tint — and I saw the
grotto so represented in the windows of the
paint-shops at Naples. But to my own ex-
perience it did not differ from other caves
in colour or form : there was the customary
clamminess in the air ; the sound of dropping
water ; the sense of dull and stupid solitude,
—a little relieved in this case by the mighty
music of the waves breaking against the
rocks outside. The grot is not great in ex-
tent, and the roof in the rear shelves gradu-
ally down to the water. Valery says that
some remains of a gallery have caused the
supposition that the grotto was once the
scene of Tiberius's pleasures ; and the Prus-
sian painter who discovered the cave was led
to seek it by something he had read of a
staircase by which Barbarossa used to descend
into a subterranean retreat from the town
of Anacapri on the mountain-top. The
slight fragment of ruin which we saw in one
corner of the cave might be taken in con-
firmation of both theories ; but the patriarch
attributed the work to Barbarossa, being
probably tired at last of hearing Tiberius so
much talked about.

We returned, soaked and disappointed, to
the hotel, where we found Antonino very

162 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

doubtful about the possibility of getting back
that day to Sorrento, and disposed, when
pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad weather,
to revive the fiction of a prohibitory consul.
He was staying in Capri at our expense, and
the honest fellow would willingly have spent
a fortnight there.

We summoned the landlord to settlement,
and he came with all his household to pre-
sent the account, — each one full of visible
longing, yet restrained from asking buona-
mano by a strong sense of previous contract.
It was a deadly struggle with them, but they
conquered themselves, and blessed us as we
departed. The pretty nraletress took leave
of us on the beach, and we set sail for Sor-
rento, the ladies crouching in the bottom of
the boat, and taking their sea-sickness in
silence. As we drew near the beautiful
town, we saw how it lay on a plateau, at the
foot of the mountains, but high above the
sea. Antonino pointed out to us the house
of Tasso, — in which the novelist Cooper also
resided when in Sorrento, — a white house
not handsomer nor uglier than the rest, with
a ten-ace looking out over the water. The
bluffs are pierced by numerous arched
caverns, as I have said, giving shelter to
the fishermen's boats, and here and there a

CAPRI AND CAPEIOTES. 163

devious stairway mounts to their crests.
Up one of these we walked, noting how in
the house above us the people, with that
puerility usually mixed with the Italian love
of beauty, had placed painted busts of terra-
cotta in the windows to simulate persons
looking out. There was nothing to blame in
the breakfast we found ready at the Hotel
Rispoli ; and as for the grove of slender,
graceful orange-trees in the midst of which
the hotel stood, and which had lavished the
fruit in every direction on the ground, why,
I would willingly give for it all the currant-
bushes, with their promises of jelly and jam,
on which I gaze at this moment.

Antonino attended us to our carriage when
we went away. He had kept us all night at
Capri, it is true, and he had brought us in
at the end for a prodigious buonamano ; yet
I cannot escape the conviction that he
parted from us with an unfulfilled purpose
of greater plunder, and I have a compassion,
which I here declare, for the strangers who
fell next into his hands. He was good
enough at the last moment to say that his
name, Silver-Eye, was a nickname given him
according to a custom of the Sorrentines ;
and he made us a farewell bow that could
not be bought in America for money.

164 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

At the station of Castellamare sat a curious
cripple on the stones, — a man with little,
short, withered legs, and a pleasant face.
He showed us the ticket-office, and wanted
nothing for the politeness. After we had
been in the waiting-room for a brief time, he
came swinging himself in upon his hands,
followed by another person, who, when the
cripple had planted himself finally and
squarely on the ground, whipped out a tape
from his pocket and took his measure for
a suit of clothes, the cripple twirling and
twisting himself about in every way for the
tailor's convenience. Nobody was surprised
or amused at the sight, and when his measure
was thus publicly taken, the cripple gravely
swung himself out as he had swung himself
in.

PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS. 165

XI.

THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT
NAPLES.

I HAD the pleasure one day of visiting
nearly all the free schools which the wise
philanthropy of the Protestant residents of
Naples has established in that city. The
schools had a peculiar interest for me, be-
cause I had noticed (in an uncareful fashion
enough, no doubt) the great changes which
had taken place in Italy under its new na-
tional government, and was desirous to see
for myself the sort of progress the Italians
of the South were making in avenues so long
closed to them. I believe I have no mania
for missionaries ; I have heard of the con-
verted Jew-and-a-half, and I have thought
it a good joke ; but I cannot help offering a
very cordial homage to the truth that the
missionaries are doing a vast deal of good in
Naples, where they are not only spreading
the gospel, but the spelling-book, the arith-
metic, and the geography.

166 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

It is not to be understood from the word
missionaries, that this work is done by men
especially sent from England or America to
perform it. The free Protestant schools in
Naples are conducted under the auspices of
the Evangelical Aid Committee, — composed
of members of the English Church, the Swiss
Church, and the Presbyterian Church ; the
President of this committee is Dr. Strange,
an Englishman, and the Treasurer is Mr.
Rogers, the American banker. The mis-
sionaries in Naples, therefore, are men who
have themselves found out their work and
appointed themselves to do it. The gentle-
man by whose kindness I was permitted to
visit the schools was one of these men, — the
Rev. Mr. Buscarlet, the pastor of the Pres-
byterian Church in Naples, a Swiss by birth,
who had received his education chiefly in
Scotland.

He accompanied me to the different
schools, and as we walked up the long
Toledo, and threaded our way through the
sprightly Neapolitan crowd, he told me of
the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar
difficulties encountered in their foundation
and maintenance. They are no older than
the union of Naples with the Kingdom of
Italy, when toleration of Protestantism was

PROTESTANT BAGGED SCHOOLS. 167

decreed by law ; and from the first, their
managers proceeded upon a principle of per-
fect openness and candour with the parents
who wished to send their children to them.
They announced that the children would be
taught certain branches of learning, and
that the whole Bible would be placed in
their hands, to be studied and understood.
In spite of this declaration of the Protestant
character of the schools, the parents of the
children were so anxious to secure them the
benefits of education, that they willingly
ran the risk of their becoming heretics.
They were principally people of the lower
classes, — labourers, hackmen, fishermen, do-
mestics, and very small shopkeepers, but
occasionally among them were parents able
to send their children to other schools, yet
preferring the thorough and conscientious
system practised in these. So the children
came, and, thanks to the peaceful, uncom-
bative nature of Italian boys, who get on
with much less waylaying and thumping
and bullying than boys of northern blood,
they have not been molested by their com-
panions who still live the wild life of the
streets, and they have only once suffered
through interference of the priests. On
complaint to the authorities the wrong was

168 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

promptly redressed, and was not again in-
flicted. Of course these poor little people,
picked up out of the vileness and ignorance
of a city that had suffered for ages the most
degrading oppression, are by no means re-
generate yet, but there seems to be great
hope for them. Now at least they are taught
a reasonable and logical morality — and who
can tell what wonders the novel instruction
may not work ? They learn for the first
time that it is a foolish shame to lie and
cheat, and it would scarcely be surprising if
some of them were finally persuaded that
Honesty is the best Policy — a maxim that
few Italians believe. And here lies the
trouble, — in the unfathomable, dishearten-
ing duplicity of the race. The children are
not quarrelsome, nor cruel, nor brutal ; but
the servile defect of falsehood fixed by long
generations of slavery in the Italians, is
almost ineradicable. The fault is worse in
Naples than elsewhere in Italy ; but how
bad it is everywhere, not merely travellers,
but all residents in Italy, must bear wit-
ness.

The first school which we visited was a
girls' school, in which some forty-four little
women of all ages, from four to fifteen years,
were assembled under the charge of a young

PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS. 169

Corfute girl, an Italian Protestant, who had
delegated her authority to different children
under her. The small maidens gathered
around their chiefs in groups, and read from
the book in which they were studying when
we appeared. Some allowance must be
made for difference of the languages, Italian
being logically spelled and easily pro-
nounced ; but I certainly never heard Ameri-
can children of their age read nearly so
well. They seemed also to have a lively
understanding of what they read, and to be
greatly interested in the scriptural stories of
which their books were made up. They re-
peated verses from the Bible, and stanzas of
poetry, all very eagerly and prettily. As
bashfulness is scarcely known to their race,
they had no hesitation in showing off their
accomplishments before a stranger, and
seemed quite delighted with his applause.
They were not particularly quiet ; perhaps
with young Neapolitans that would be im-
possible. I saw their copy-books, in which
the writing was very good (I am sure the
printer would like mine to be as legible),
and the books were kept neat and clean, as
were the hands and faces of the children.
Taking the children as one goes in the
streets of Naples, it would require a day

170 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

perhaps to find as many clean ones as I saw
in these schools, where cleanliness is resol-
utely insisted upon. Many of the children
were ragged ; here and there was one hid-
eous with ophtJialmia ; but there was not
a clouded countenance, nor a dirty hand
among them. We should have great hopes
for a nation of which the children can be
taught to wash themselves.

There were fourteen pupils in the boys'
superior school, where geography, mathe-
matics, linear drawing, French, Italian his-
tory, and ancient history were taught. A
brief examination showed the boys to be
well up in their studies ; — indeed they fur-
nished some recondite information about
Baffin's Bay for which I should not myself
have liked to be called on suddenly. Their
drawing-books were prodigies of neatness,
and betrayed that aptness for form and
facility of execiition which are natural to
the Italians. Some of these boys had been
in the schools nearly three years ; they were
nearly all of the class which must otherwise
have grown up to hopeless vagabondage ;
but here they were receiving gratis an edu-
cation that would fit them for employments
wherein trained intellectual capacity is re-
quired. If their education went no higher

PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS. 171

than this, what an advance it would be upon
their original condition !

In the room devoted to boys of lower
grade, I entangled myself in difficulties with
a bright-eyed young gentleman, whom I
asked if he liked Italian history better than
ancient history. He said he liked the
latter, especially that of the Romans, much
better. " Why, that is strange. I should
think an Italian boy would like Italian
history best. " " But were not the Romans
also Italians, Signore ?" I blush to say that
I basely sneaked out of this trouble by an-
swering that they were not like the Italians
of the present day, — whatever that meant.
But indeed all these young persons were
startlingly quick with their information,
and, knowing that I knew very little on any
subject with certainty, I think I was wise
to refuse all offers to examine them in their
studies.

We left this school, and returned to the
Toledo by one of these wonderful little
side streets already mentioned, which are
for ever tumultuous with the oddest Neapoli-
tan life — with men quarrelling themselves
purple over small quantities of fish — with
asses braying loud and clear above their
discord — with women roasting pine-cones at

172 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

charcoal fires — with children in the agonies
of having their hair combed — with degraded
poultry and homeless dogs — with fruit-stands
and green groceries, and the little edifices of
ecclesiastical architecture for the sale of
lemonade — with wandering bag-pipers, and
herds of nonchalant goats — with horses, and
grooms currying them — and over all, from
vast heights of balcony, with people lazily
hanging upon rails and looking down on
the riot. Re-entering the stream of the
Toledo, it carried us almost to the Museo
Borbonico before we again struck aside into
one of the smaller streets, whence we
climbed quite to the top of one of those in-
credibly high Neapolitan houses . Here, cross -
ing an open terrace on the roof, we visited
three small rooms, in which there were al-
together some hundred boys in the first
stages of reclamation. They were under
the immediate superintendence of Mr.
Buscarlet, and he seemed to feel the fond-
est interest in them. Indeed, there was suffi-
cient reason for this : up to a certain point,
the Neapolitan children learn so rapidly
and willingly that it can hardly be other
than a pleasure to teach them. After this,
their zeal flags ; they know enough ; and
their parents and friends, far more ignorant

PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS. 173

than they, are perfectly satisfied with their
progress. Then the difficulties of their
teachers begin ; but here, in these lowest
grade schools, they had not yet begun. The
boys were still eager to learn, and were
ardently following the lead of their teachers.
They were little fellows, nearly all, and none
of them had been in school more than a year
and a half, while some had been there only
three or four months. They rose up with
" Buon giorno, signori," as we entered, and
could hardly be persuaded to lapse back to
the duties of life during our stay. They
had very good faces indeed, for the most
part, and even the vicious had intellectual
brightness. Just and consistent usage has
the best influence on them; and one boy
was pointed out as quite docile and manage-
able, whose parents had given him up as in-
corrigible before he entered the school. As
it was, there was something almost pathetic
in his good behaviour, as being possible to
him, but utterly alien to his instincts. The
boys of these schools seldom play truant,
and they are never severely beaten in school ;
when quite intractable, notice is given to
their parents, and they usually return in a
more docile state. It sometimes happens
that the boys are taken away by their

1T4 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

parents, from one motive or another; but
they find their way back again, and are re-
ceived as if nothing had happened.

The teacher in the first room here is a
handsome young Calabriau, with the gen-
tlest face and manner, — one of the most
efficient teachers under Mr. Buscarlet. The
boys had out their Bibles when we entered,
and one after another read passages to us.
There were children of seven, eight, and
nine years, who had been in the school only
three months, and who read any part of
their Bibles with facility and correctness;
of course, before coming to school they had
not known one letter from another. The
most accomplished scholar was a youngster
named Saggiomo, who had received eighteen
months' schooling. He was consequently
very quick indeed, and wanted to answer
all the hard questions put to the other boys.
In fact, all of them were ready enough, and
there was a great deal of writhing and snap-
ping of fingers among those who longed to
answer some hesitator's question — just as
you see in schools at home. They were ex
aniined in geography, and then in Bible
history, — particularly Joseph's story. They
responded in chorus to all demands on this
part of study, and could hardly be quieted

PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS. 175

sufficiently to give Saggiomo's little brother
(aged five) a chance to tell why Joseph's
brethren sold him. As soon as he could be
heard he piped out : ' ' Perclie Giuseppe aveva
del soyni!" (Because Joseph had dreams.)
It was not exactly the right answer, but
nobody laughed at the little fellow, though
they all roared out in correction when per-
mitted.

In the next room, boys somewhat older
were examined in Italian history, and re-
sponded correctly and promptly. They
were given a sum which they performed in
a miraculously short time ; and their copy-
books, when shown, were equally creditable
to them. Their teacher was a Bolognese, —
a naturalised Swiss, — who had been a soldier,
and who maintained strict discipline among
his irregulars, without, however, any per-
ceptible terrorism.

The amount of work these teachers ac-
complish in a day is incredible : the boys'
school opens at eight in the morning and
closes at four, with intermission of an hour
at noon. Then in the evening the same
men teach a school for adults, and on Sun-
day have their classes in the Sunday schools.
And this the whole year round. Their pay
is not great, being about twenty dollars a

176 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

month, and they are evidently not wholly
self-interested from this fact. The amount
of good they accomplish under the direction
of their superiors is in proportion to the
work done. To appreciate it, the reader
must consider that they take the children
of the most ignorant and degraded of all
the Italians ; that they cause them to be
washed corporeally, first of all, and then set
about cleansing them morally ; and, having
cleared away as much of the inherited cor-
ruption of ages as possible, they begin to
educate them in the various branches of
learning. There is no direct proselyting in
the schools, but the Bible is the first study,
and the children are constantly examined in
it ; and the result is at least not supersti-
tion. The advance upon the old condition
of things is incalculably great ; for till the
revolution under Garibaldi in 1860, the
schools of Naples were all in the hands of
the priests or their creatures, and the little
learning there imparted was as dangerous as
it could well be made. Now these schools
are free, the children are honestly and
thoroughly taught, and, if they are not
directly instructed in Protestantism, are at
least instructed to associate religion with
morality, probably for the first time in their

PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS. 177

lives. Too much credit cannot be given to
the Italian Government, which has acted hi
such good faith with the men engaged in
this work, protecting them from all inter-
ruption and persecution ; but after all, the
great praise is due to their own wise,
unflagging zeal. They have worked unos-
tentatiously, making no idle attacks on
time-honoured prejudices, but still having a
purpose of enlightenment which they frankly
avowed. The people whom they seek to
benefit judge them by their works, and the
result is that they have quite as much be-
fore them as they can do. Their discourage-
ments are great. The day's teaching is often
undone at home; the boys forget as aptly
as they learn ; and, from the fact that only
the baser feelings of fear and interest have
ever been appealed to before in the Neapoli-
tans, they have often to build in treacher-
ous places without foundation of good faith
or gratitude. Embarrassments for want of
adequate funds are sometimes felt also. But
no one can study their operations without
feeling that success must attend their efforts,
with honour to them, and with inestimable
benefits to the generation which shall one
clay help to govern free Italy.

VOL. L M

178 ITALIAN JOTJKNEYS.

XII.

BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES.

ONE day it became plain even to our
reluctance that we could not stay in
Naples for ever, and the next morning we
took the train for Rome. The Villa Reale
put on its most alluring charm to him that
ran down before breakfast to thrid once
more its pathways bordered with palms
and fountains and statues ; the bay beside
it purpled and twinkled in the light that
made silver of the fishermen's sails ; far
away rose Vesuvius with his nightcap of
mist still hanging about his shoulders; all
around rang and rattled Naples. The city
was never so fair before, nor could ever
have been so hard to leave ; and at the last
moment the landlord of the Hotel Washing-
ton must needs add a supreme pang by
developing into a poet, and presenting me
with a copy of a comedy he had written.
The reader who has received at parting
from the gentlemanly proprietor of one of

BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES. 179

our palatial hotels his " Ode on the Steam
Elevator," will conceive of the shame and
regret with which I thought of having
upbraided our landlord about our rooms,
of having stickled at small preliminaries
concerning our contract for board, and for
having altogether treated him as one of
the uninspired. Let me do him the tardy
justice to say that he keeps, after the
Stella d'Oro at Ferrara, the best hotel in
Italy, and that his comedy was really very
sprightly. It is no small thing to know
how to keep a hotel, as we know, and a
poet who does it ought to have a double
acclaim.

Nobody who cares to travel with decency
and comfort can take the second-class cars
on the road between Naples and Rome,
though these are perfectly good everywhere
else in Italy. The Papal city makes her
influence felt for shabbiness and uncleanli-
ness wherever she can, and her management
seems to prevail 011 this railway. A glance
into the second-class cars reconciled us to
the first-class, — which in themselves were
bad, — and we took our places almost con-
tentedly.

The road passed through the wildest
country we had seen in Italy; and pre-

180 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

sently a rain began to fall, and made it
drearier than ever. The land was much
grown up with thickets of hazel, and was
here and there sparsely wooded with oaks.
Under these, hogs were feeding upon the
acorns, and the wet swineherds were steam-
ing over fires built at their roots. In some
places the forest was quite dense ; in other
places it fell entirely away, and left the
rocky hill-sides bare, and solitary but for the
sheep that nibbled at the scanty grass, and
the shepherds that leaned upon their crooks
and motionlessly stared at us as we rushed
by. As we drew near Rome, the scenery
grew lonelier yet ; the land rose into deso-
late, sterile, stony heights, without a patch
of verdure on their nakedness, and at last
abruptly dropped into the gloomy expanse
of the Campagna.

The towns along the route had little to
interest us in their looks, though at San
Germane we caught a glimpse of the famous
old convent of Monte-Cassino, perched aloft
on its cliff, and looking like a part of the
rock on which it was built. Fancy now
loves to climb that steep acclivity, and
wander through the many-volumed library
of the ancient Benedictine retreat, and on the
whole finds it less fatiguing, and certainly

BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES. 181

less expensive, than actual ascent and ac-
quaintance with the monastery would have
been. Two Croatian priests, who shared
our compartment of the railway carriage,
first drew our notice to the place, and were
enthusiastic about it for many miles after it
was out of sight. What gentle and pleasant
men they were, and how hard it seemed
that they should be priests and Croats !
They told us all about the city of Spalato,
where they lived, and gave us such a
glowing account of Dalmatian poets and
poetry that we began to doubt at last if the
seat of literature were not somewhere on the
east coast of the Adriatic ; and I hope we
left them the impression that the literary
centre of the world was not a thousand
miles from the horse-car office in Harvard
Square.

Here and there repairs were going forward
on the railroad, and most of the labourers
were women. They were straight and hand-
some girls, and moved with a stately grace
under the baskets of earth balanced on
their heads. Brave black eyes they had,
such as love to look and to be looked
at; they were not in the least hurried by
their work, but desisted from it to gaze at
the passengers whenever the train stopped.

182 ITALIAN JOUENEYS.

They all wore their beautiful peasant cos-
tume,— the square white linen head-dress
falling to the shoulders, the crimson bodice,
and the red scant skirt ; and how they
contrived to keep themselves so clean at
their work, and to look so spectacular in
it all, remains one of the many Italian
mysteries.

Another of these mysteries we beheld in
the little beggar-boy at Isoletta. He stood
at the corner of the station quite mute and
motionless during our pause, and made no
sign of supplication or entreaty. He let his
looks beg for him. He was perfectly beau-
tiful and exceedingly picturesque. Where
his body was not quite naked, his jacket
and trousers hung in shreds and points ;
his long hair grew through the top of
his hat, and fell over like a plume. No-
body could resist him ; people ran out of
the cars, at the risk of being left behind, to
put coppers into the little dirty hand held
languidly out to receive them. The boy
thanked none, smiled on none, but looked
curiously and cautiously at all, with the
quick perception and the illogical con-
clusions of his class and race. As we
started he did not move, but remained in
his attitude of listless tranquillity. As we

BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES. 183

glanced back, the mystery of him seemed to
be solved for a moment : he would stand
there till he grew up into a graceful,
prayerful, pitiless brigand, and then he
would rend from travel the tribute now so
freely given him. But after all, though his
future seemed clear, and he appeared the
type of a strange and hardly reclaimable
people, he was not quite a solution of the
Neapolitan puzzle.

184 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

XIII.

ROMAN PEARLS.

THE first view of the ruins in the Forum
brought a keen sense of disappointment.
I knew that they could only be mere frag-
ments and rubbish, but I was not prepared
to find them so. I learned that I had all
along secretly hoped for some dignity of
neighbourhood, some affectionate solicitude
on the part of Nature to redeem these works
of Art from the destruction that had befallen
them. But in hollows below the level of the
dirty cow-field, wandered over by evil-eyed
buffaloes, and obscenely defiled by wild
beasts of men, there stood here an arch,
there a pillar, yonder a cluster of columns
crowned by a bit of frieze; and yonder
again a fragment of temple, half -gorged by
the fa9ade of a hideous Renaissance church ;
then a height of vaulted brickwork, and,
leading on to the Coliseum, another arch,
and then incoherent columns overthrown

ROMAN PEARLS. 185

and mixed with dilapidated walls — mere
phonographic consonants, dumbly represent-
ing the past, out of which all vocal glory
had departed. The Coliseum itself does not
much better express a certain phase of
Roman life than does the Arena at Verona ;
it is larger only to the foot-rule, and it
seemed not grander otherwise, while it is
vastly more ruinous. Even the Pantheon
failed to impress me at first sight, though I
found myself disposed to return to it again
and again, and to be more and more affected
by it.

Modern Rome appeared, first and last,
hideous. It is the least interesting town in
Italy, and the architecture is hopelessly
ugly — especially the architecture of the
churches. The Papal city contrives at the
beginning to hide the Imperial city from
your thought, as it hides it in such a
great degree from your eye, and old Rome
only occurs to you in a sort of stupid wonder
over the depth at which it is buried. I
confess that I was glad to get altogether
away from it after a first look at the ruins
in the Forum, and to take refuge in the
Conservatorio delle Mendicanti, where we
were charged to see the little Virginia G.
The Conservatorio, though a charitable in-

186 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

stitution, is not so entirely meant for
mendicants as its name would imply, but
none of the many young girls there were
the children of rich men. They were often
enough of parentage actually hungry and
ragged, but they were often also the
daughters of honest poor folk, who paid a
certain sum toward their maintenance and
education in the Conservatorio. Such was
the case with little Virginia, whose father
was at Florence, doubly impeded from
seeing her by the fact that he had fought
against the Pope for the Republic of 1848,
and by the other fact that he had since
wrought the Pope a yet deadlier injury by
turning Protestant.

Ringing a garrulous bell that continued to
jingle some time after we were admitted, we
found ourselves in a sort of reception-room,
of the general quality of a cellar, and in the
presence of a portress who was perceptibly
preserved from mould only by the great pot
of coals that stood in the centre of the place.
Some young girls, rather pretty than not,
attended the ancient woman, and kindly
acted as the ear-trumpet through which our
wishes were conveyed to her mind. The
Conservatorio was not, so far, as conventual
as we had imagined it ; but as the gentleman

ROMAN PEARLS. 187

of the party was strongly guarded by female
friends, and asked at once to see the Su-
perior, he concluded that there was, per-
haps, something so unusually reassuring to
the recluses in his appearance and manner
that they had not thought it necessary to
behave very rigidly. It later occurred to
this gentleman that the promptness with
which the pretty mendicants procured him
an interview with the Superior had a flavour
of self-interest in it, and that he who came
to the Conservatorio in the place of a father
might have been for a moment ignorantly
viewed as a yet dearer and tenderer possi-
bility. From whatever danger there was in
this error the Superior soon appeared to
rescue him, and we were invited into a more
ceremonious apartment on the first floor, and
the little Virginia was sent for. The visit
of the strangers caused a tumult and interest
in the quiet old Conservatorio of which it is
hard to conceive now, and the excitement
grew tremendous when it appeared that the
signori were American! and Protestanti. We
imparted a savour of novelty and importance
to Virginia herself, and when she appeared,
the Superior and her assistant looked at her
with no small curiosity and awe, of which
the little maiden instantly became conscious,

188 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

and began to take advantage. Accom-
panying us over the building and through
the grounds, she cut her small friends wher-
ever she met them, and was not more than
respectful to the assistant.

It was from an instinct of hospitality that
we were shown the Conservatorio, and in-
structed in regard to all its purposes. We
saw the neat dormitories with their bat-
talions of little white beds ; the kitchen
with its gigantic coppers for boiling broth,
and the refectory with the smell of the
frugal dinners of generations of mendicants
in it. The assistant was very proud of the
neatness of everything, and was glad to talk
of that, or, indeed, anything else. It ap-
peared that the girls were taught reading,
writing, and plain sewing when they were
young, and that the Conservatorio was
chiefly sustained by pious contributions and
bequests. Any lingering notion of the con-
ventual character of the place was dispelled
by the assistant's hurrying to say, "And
when we can get the poor things well
married, we are glad to do so."

" But how does any one ever see them ?"
" Eh ! well, that is easily managed. Once
a month we dress the marriageable girls in
their best, and take them for a walk in the

ROMAN PEARLS. 189

street. If an honest young man falls in love
with one of them going by, he comes to the
Superior, and describes her as well as he
can, and demands to see her. She is called,
and if both are pleased, the marriage is ar-
ranged. You see it is a very simple affair."

And there was, to the assistant's mind,
nothing odd in the whole business, insomuch
that I felt almost ashamed of marvelling at
it.

Issuing from the back-door of the convent,
we ascended by stairs and gateways into gar-
den spaces, chiefly planted with turnips and
the like poor but respectable vegetables,
and curiously adorned with fragments of an-
tique statuary, and here and there a foun-
tain in a corner, trickling from moss-grown
rocks, and falling into a trough of traver-
tine, about the feet of some poor old goddess
or Virtue who had forgotten what her name
was.

Once, the assistant said, speaking as if
the thing had been within her recollection,
though it must have been centuries before,
the antiquities of the Conservatorio were
much more numerous and striking ; but
they were now removed to the different
museums. Nevertheless they had still a
beautiful prospect left, which we were wel-

190 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

come to enjoy if we would follow her ; and
presently, to our surprise, we stepped from
the garden upon the roof of the Temple of
Peace. The assistant had not boasted with-
out reason : away before us stretched the
Campagna, a level waste, and empty but
for the umbrella-palms that here and there
waved like black plumes upon it, and for
the arched lengths of the aqueducts that
seemed to stalk down from the ages across
the melancholy expanse like files of giants,
with now and then a ruinous gap in the line,
as if one had fallen out weary by the way.
The city all around us glittered asleep in
the dim December sunshine, and far below
us, — on the length of the Forum over which
the Appian Way stretched from the Capito-
line Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus
and the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Con-
stantine, leaving the Coliseum on the left,
and losing itself in the foliage of the suburbs,
— the Past seemed struggling to emerge from
the ruins, and to reshape and animate itself
anew. The effort was more successful than
that which we had helped the Past to make
when standing on the level of the Forum ;
but Antiquity must have been painfully con-
scious of the incongruity of the red-legged
Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of

ROMAN PEARLS. 191

the bewildered tourists trying to make her
out with their Hurrays.

In a day or two after this we returned
again to our Conservatorio, where we found
that the excitement created by our first
visit had been kept fully alive by the events
attending the photographing of Virginia for
her father. Not only Virginia was there to
receive us, but her grandmother also — an
old, old woman, dumb through some infir-
mity of age, who could only weep and smile
in token of her content. I think she had
but a dim idea, after all, of what went on
beyond the visible fact of Virginia's photo-
graph, and that she did not quite under-
stand how we could cause it to be taken for
her son. She was deeply compassionated by
the Superior, who rendered her pity with a
great deal of gesticulation, casting up her
eyes, shrugging her shoulders, and sighing
grievously. But the assistant's cheerful-
ness could not be abated even by the spec-
tacle of extreme age : and she made the
most of the whole occasion, recounting with
great minuteness all the incidents of the
visit to the photographer's, and running to
get the dress Virginia sat in, that we might
see how exactly it was given in the picture.
Then she gave us much discourse concern-

192 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

ing the Conservatorio and its usages, and
seemed not to wish us to think that life
there was altogether eventless. " Here we
have a little amusement also," she said.
" The girls have their relatives to visit
them sometimes, and then in the evening
they dance. Oh, they enjoy themselves !
I am half old (mezzo-vecchia). I am done
with these things. But for youth, always
kept down, something lively is wanted."

When we took leave of these simple folks,
we took leave of almost the whole natural
and unprepared aspect of Italian life which
we were to see in Rome ; but we did not
know this at the time.

ii.

INDEED, it seems to me that all moisture
of romance and adventure has been well-nigh
sucked out of travel in Italy, and that com-
pared with the old time, when the happy
wayfarer journeyed by vettura through the
innumerable little states of the Peninsula,
— halted every other mile to show his pass-
port, and robbed by customs officers in every
colour of shabby uniform and every variety
of cocked hat, — the present railroad period
is one of but stale and insipid flavour. Much
of local life and colour remains, of course ;

ROMAN PEARLS. 193

but the hurried traveller sees little of it,
and, passed from one grand hotel to another,
without material change in the cooking or
the methods of extortion, he might nearly
as well remain at Paris. The Italians, who
live to so great extent by the travel through
their country, learn our abominable lan-
guages and minister to our detestable com-
fort and propriety, till we have slight chance
to know them as we once could,— musical,
picturesque, and full of sweet, natural
knaveries, graceful falsehood, and all un-
cleanness. Rome really belongs to the
Anglo-Saxon nations, and the Pope and the
past seem to be carried on entirely for our
diversion. Everything is systematised as
thoroughly as in a museum where the ob-
jects are all ticketed ; and our prejudices
are consulted even down to alms-giving.
Honest Beppo is gone from the steps in the
Piazza di Spagna, and now the beggars are
labelled like policemen, with an immense
plate bearing the image of St. Peter, so that
you may know you give to a worthy person
when you bestow charity on one of them,
and not, alas ! to some abandoned impostor,
as in former days. One of these highly re-
commended mendicants gave the last finish
to the system, and begged of us in English !
VOL. i. x

194 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

No custodian will answer you, if he can
help it, in the Italian which he speaks so
exquisitely, preferring to speak bad French
instead, and in all the shops on the Corso
the English tongue is de rigueiir.

After our dear friends at the Conserva-
torio, I think we found one of the most
simple and interesting of Romans in the
monk who showed us the Catacombs of St.
Sebastian. These catacombs, he assured us,
were not restored like those of St. Calixtus,
but were just as the martyrs left them ; and,
as I do not remember to have read anywhere
that they are formed merely of long, low,
narrow, wandering under-ground passages,
lined on either side with tombs in tiers like
berths on a steamer, and expanding here and
there into small square chambers, bearing
the traces of ancient frescoes, and evidently
used as chapels, — I venture to offer the in-
formation here. The reader is to keep hi
his mind a darkness broken by the light of
wax tapers, a close smell, and crookedness
and narrowness, or he cannot realise the
catacombs as they are in fact. Our monkish
guide, before entering the passage leading
from the floor of the church to the tombs,
in which there was still some "fine small
dust" of the martyrs, warned us that to

ROMAN PEARLS. 195

touch it was to incur the penalty of excom-
munication, and then gently craved pardon
for having mentioned the fact. But, indeed,
it was only to persons who showed a certain
degree of reverence that these places were
now exhibited ; for some Protestants who
had been permitted there had stolen hand-
fuls of the precious ashes, merely to throw
away. I assured him that I thought them
beasts to do it ; and I was afterwards
puzzled to know what should attract their
wantonness in the remnants of mortality,
hardly to be distinguished from the common
earth out of which the catacombs were dug.

RETURNING to the church above we found,
kneeling before one of the altars, two pil-
grims,— a man and a woman. The latter
was habited in a nunlike dress of black, and
the former in a long pilgrim's coat of coarse
blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in his
hand, and showed under his close hood a
fine, handsome, reverent face, full of a sort
of tender awe, touched with the pathos of
penitence. In attendance upon the two was
a dapper little silk-hatted man, with rogue
so plainly written in his devotional counte-
nance that I was not surprised to be told

19G ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

that he was a species of spiritual valet de
place, whose occupation it was to attend
pilgrims on their tour to the Seven Churches
at which these devotees pray in Rome, and
there to direct their orisons and join in
them.

It was not to the pilgrims, but to the
heretics that the monk now uncovered the
precious marble slab on which Christ stood
when He met Peter flying from Rome and
turned him back. You are shown the
prints of the divine feet, which the conscious
stone received and keeps for ever ; and near
at hand is one of the arrows with which
St. Sebastian was shot. We looked at these
things critically, having to pay for the spec-
tacle ; but the pilgrims and their guide were
all faith and wonder.

I remember seeing nothing else so finely
superstitious at Rome. In a chapel near
the Church of St. John Lateran are, as is
well known, the marble steps which once
belonged to Pilate's house, and which the
Saviour is said to have ascended when He
went to trial before Pilate. The steps are
protected against the wear and tear of
devotion by a stout casing of wood, and
they are constantly covered M-ith penitents,
who ascend and descend them upon their

ROMAN PEARLS. 197

knees. Most of the pious people whom I
saw in this act were children, and the boys
enjoyed it with a good deal of giggling, as a
very amusing feat. Some old and haggard
women gave the scene all the dignity which
it possessed ; but certain well-dressed ladies
and gentlemen were undeniably awkward
and absurd, and I was led to doubt if there
were not an incompatibility between the
abandon of simple faith and the respecta-
bility of good clothes.

IV.

Ix all other parts of Italy one hears
constant talk among travellers of the ma-
laria at Rome, and, having seen a case of
Roman fever, I know it is a thing not to be
trifled with. But in Rome itself the mala-
ria is laughed at by the foreign residents, —
who, nevertheless, go out of the city in
midsummer. The Romans, to the number
of a hundred thousand or so, remain there
the whole year round, and I am bound to
say I never saw a healthier, robuster-looking
population. The cheeks of the French
soldiers, too, whom we met at every turn,
were red as their trousers, and they seemed
to flourish on the imputed unwholesomeness
of the atmosphere. All at Rome are united

198 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

in declaring that the fever exists at Naples,
and that sometimes those who have taken it
there come and die in Rome, in order to
give the city a bad name ; and I think this
very likely.

Rome is certainly dirty, however, though
there is a fountain in every square, and you
are never out of the sound of falling water.
The Corso and some of the principal streets
do not so much impress you with their filth
as with their dulness ; but that part of the
city where some of the most memorable relics
of antiquity are to be found is unimaginably
vile. The least said of the state of the arch-
ways of the Coliseum the soonest mended ;
and I have already spoken of the Forum.
The streets near the Theatre of Pompey are
almost impassable, and the so-called House
of Rienzi is a stable, fortified against approach
by a foss6 of excrement. A noisome smell
seems to be esteemed the most appropriate
offering to the memory of ancient Rome, and
I am not sure that the moderns are mistaken
in this. In the rascal streets in the neigh-
bourhood of the most august ruins, the
people turn round to stare at the stranger as
he passes them ; they are all dirty, and his
decency must be no less a surprise to them
than the neatness of the French soldiers amid

ROMAN PEARLS. 199

all the filth is a puzzle to him. We wandered
about a long time in such places one day,
looking for the Tarpeian Rock, less for Tar-
peia's sake than for the sake of Miriam and
Donatello and the Model. There are two
Tarpeian rocks, between which the stranger
takes his choice ; and we must have chosen
the wrong one, for it seemed but a shallow
gulf compared to that in our fancy. We
were somewhat disappointed ; but then Ni-
agara disappoints one ; and as for Mont
Blanc .

IT is worth while for every one who goes
to Rome to visit the Church of St. Peter ;
but it is scarcely worth while for me to
describe it, or for every one to go up into
the bronze globe on the top of the cupola.
In fact, this is a great labour, and there is
nothing to be seen from the crevices in the
ball which cannot be far more comfortably
seen from the roof of the church below.

The companions of our ascent to the latter
point were an English lady and gentleman,
brother and sister, and both Catholics, as
they at once told us. The lady and myself
spoke for some time in the Tuscan tongue
before we discovered that neither of us was

*200 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

Italian, after which we paid each other
some handsome compliments upon fluency
and perfection of accent. The gentleman
was a pleasant purple porpoise from the
waters of Chili, whither he had wandered
from the English coasts in early youth. He
had two leading ideas : one concerned the
Pope, to whom he had just been presented,
and whom he viewed as the best and
blandest of beings ; the other related to his
boy, then in England, whom he called Jack
Spratt, and considered the grandest and
greatest of boys. With the view from the
roof of the church this gentleman did not
much trouble himself. He believed Jack
Spratt could ride up to the roof where we
stood on his donkey. As to the great bronze
globe which we were hurrying to enter, he
seemed to regard it merely as a rival in
rotundity, and made not the slightest mo-
tion to follow us.

I should be loth to vex the reader with
any description of the scene before us and
beneath us, even if I could faithfully por-
tray it. But I recollect, with a pleasure not
to be left unrecorded, the sweetness of the
great fountain playing in the square before
the church, and the harmony in which the
city grew in every direction from it, like an

ROMAN PEARLS. 201

emanation from its music, till the last house
sank away into the pathetic solitude of the
Campagna, with nothing beyond but the
snow-capped mountains lighting up the
remotest distance. At the same moment I
experienced a rapture in reflecting that I
had underpaid three hackmen during my
stay in Rome, and thus contributed to
avenge my race for ages of oppression.

The vastness of St. Peter's itself is best
felt in looking down upon the interior from
the gallery that surrounds the inside of the
dome, and in comparing one's own littleness
with the greatness of all the neighbouring
mosaics. But as to the beauty of the temple,
I could not find it without or within.

Ix Rome one's fellow-tourists are a con-
stant source of gratification and surprise.
I thought that American travellers were by
no means the most absurd among those v/e
saw, nor even the loudest in their approval
of the Eternal City. A certain order of
German greenness affords, perhaps, the plea-
santest pasturage for the ruminating mind.
For example, at the Villa Ludovisi there
was, beside numerous Englishry in detached
bodies, a troop of Germans, — chiefly young

202 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

men, — frugally pursuing the Sehenswiirdig-
keiten in the social manner of their nation.
They took their enjoyment very noisily, and
wrangled together with furious amiability
as they looked at Guercino's "Aurora."
Then two of them parted from the rest, and
went to a little summer-house in the gar-
dens, while the others followed us to the top
of the Casino. There they caught sight of
their friends in the arbour, and the spectacle
appeared to overwhelm them. They bowed,
they took off their hats, they waved their
handkerchiefs. It was not enough : one
young fellow mounted on the balustrade of
the roof at his neck's risk, lifted his hat on
his cane, and flourished it in greeting to the
heart's-friends in the arbour, from whom he
had parted two minutes before.

In strange contrast to the producer of this
enthusiasm, so pumped and so unmistakably
mixed with beer, a fat and pallid English-
woman sat in a chair upon the roof, and
coldly, coldly sketched the lovely landscape.
And she and the blonde young English girl
beside her pronounced a little dialogue to-
gether, which I give, because I saw that
they meant it for the public —

The Yoiing Girl. — I wonder, you knoa,
you don't draw-ow St. Petuh's!

ROMAN PEARLS. 203

The Artist. — 0 ah, you knoa, I can draw-
ow St. Petuh's from so mennee powints.

I am afraid that the worst form of Ameri-
can greenness appears abroad in a desire to
be perfectly up in critical appreciation of
the arts, and to approach the great works
in the spirit of the connoisseur. The ambi-
tion is not altogether a bad one. Still I
could not help laughing at a fellow-country-
man when he told me that he had not yet
seen Raphael's "Transfiguration," because
he wished to prepare his mind for under-
standing the original by first looking at all
the copies he could find.

VII.

THE Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura sur-
passes everything in splendour of marble
and costly stone — porphyry, malachite, ala-
baster— and luxury of gilding that is to be
seen at Rome. But I chiefly remember it
because on the road that leads to it, through
scenes as quiet and peaceful as if history
had never known them, lies the Protestant
graveyard in which Keats is buried. Quite
by chance the driver mentioned it, pointing
in the direction of the cemetery with his
whip. We eagerly dismounted and repaired
to the gate, where we were met by the son

204 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

of the sexton, who spoke English through
the beauteous line of a curved Hebrew nose.
Perhaps a Christian could not be found in
Rome to take charge of these heretic graves,
though Christians can be got to do almost
anything there for money. However, I do
not think a Catholic would have kept the
place in better order, or more intelligently
understood our reverent curiosity. It was
the new burial-ground which we had entered,
and which is a little to the right of the elder
cemetery. It was very beautiful and taste-
ful in every way ; the names upon the stones
were chiefly English and Scotch, with here
and there an American's. But affection
drew us only to the prostrate tablet inscribed
with the words, " Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Cor Cordium," and then we were ready to
go to the grave of him for whom we all feel
so deep a tenderness. The grave of John
Keats is one of few in the old burying-
ground, and lies almost in the shadow of the
pyramid of Caius Cestius ; and I could not
help thinking of the wonder the Roman
would have felt could he have known into
what unnameable richness and beauty his
Greek faith had ripened in the heart of the
poor poet, where it was mixed with so much
sorrow. Doubtless, in his tune, a prominent

ROMAN PEARLS. 205

citizen like Cams Cestius was a leading
member of the temple in his neighbourhood,
and regularly attended sacrifice : it would
have been but decent ; and yet I fancied
that a man immersed like him in affairs
might have learned with surprise the inner
and more fragrant meaning of the symbols
with the outside of which his life was satis-
fied ; and I was glad to reflect that in our
day such a thing is impossible.

Th^ grave of our beloved poet is sunken
to the level of the common earth, and is
only marked by the quaintly lettered, simple
stone bearing the famous epitaph. While
at Rome I heard talk of another and grander
monument which some members of the Keats
family were to place over the dust of their
great kinsman. But, for one, I hope this
may never be done, even though the original
stone should also be left there, as was
intended. Let the world still keep un-
changed this shrine, to which it can repair
with at once pity and tenderness and respect.

A rose-tree and some sweet-smelling
bushes grew upon the grave, and the roses
were in bloom. \Ye asked leave to take one
of them ; but at last could only bring our-
selves to gather some of the fallen petals.
Our Hebrew guide was willing enough, and

206 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

unconsciously set us a little example of
wantonness ; for while he listened to our
explanation of the mystery which had
puzzled him ever since he had learned
English, namely, why the stone should say
" writ on water," and not u'ritten, he kept
plucking mechanically at one of the fragrant
shrubs, pinching away the leaves, and rend-
ing the tender twig, till I, remembering the
once sensitive dust from which it grew,
waited for the tortured tree to cry out to
him with a voice of words and blood,
"Perchemischianti?"

VIII.

IT seems to me that a candid person will
wish to pause a little before condemning
Gibson's coloured statues. They have been
grossly misrepresented. They do not im-
press one at all as wax-work, and there
is great wrong in saying that their tinted
nakedness suggests impurity any more than
the white nakedness of other statues. The
colouring is quite conventional ; the flesh is
merely warmed with the hue representing
life ; the hair is always a very delicate
yellow, the eyes a tender violet, and there
is no other particularisation of colour ; a
fillet binding the hair may be gilded,— the

ROMAN PEARLS. 207

hem of a robe traced in blue. I, who had
just come from seeing the fragments of
antique statuary in Naples Museum, tinted
in the same way, could not feel that there
was anything preposterous in Gibson's
works, and I am not ashamed to say that
they gave me pleasure.

As we passed, in his studio, from one
room to another, the workman who showed
the marbles surprised and delighted us by
asking if we would like to see the sculptor,
and took us up into the little room where
Gibson worked. He was engaged upon a
bas-relief, — a visit of Psyche to the Zephyrs,
or something equally aerial and mytholo-
gical,— and received us very simply and
naturally, and at once began with some
quaint talk about the subject in hand.
When we mentioned our pleasure in his
coloured marbles we touched the right
spring, and he went on to speak of his fa-
vourite theory with visible delight, making
occasional pauses to bestow a touch on the
bas-relief, and coming back to his theme
with that self-corroborative "Yes !" of his,
which Hawthorne has immortalised. He
was dressed with extraordinary slovenliness
and indifference to clothes, had no collar, I
think, and evidently did not know what he

208 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

had on. Everything about him bespoke the
utmost unconsciousness and democratic
plainness of life, so that I could readily
believe a story I heard of him. Having
dined the greater part of his life in Roman
restaurants, where it is but wholesome to go
over your plate, glass, spoon, and knife and
fork with your napkin before using them,
the great sculptor had acquired such habits
of neatness that at table in the most aristo-
cratic house in England he absent-mindedly
went through all that ceremony of cleansing
and wiping. It is a story they tell in Rome,
where everybody is anecdoted, and not al-
ways so good-naturedly.

IX.

ONE Sunday afternoon we went with some
artistic friends to visit the studio of the
great German painter Overbeck ; and since
I first read Uhland I have known no plea-
sure so illogical as I felt in looking at this
painter's drawings. In the sensuous heart
of objective Italy he treats the themes of
mediaeval Catholicism with the most sub-
jective feeling, and I thought I perceived in
his work the enthusiasm which led many
Protestant German painters and poets of
the romantic school back into the twilight

ROMAN PEARLS. 209

of the Romish faith, in the hope that they
might thus realise to themselves something
of the earnestness which animated the elder
Christian artists. Overbeck's work is beau-
tiful, but it is unreal, and expresses the
sentiment of no time ; as the work of the
romantic German poets seems without rela-
tion to any world men ever lived in.

Wcalking from the painter's house, two
of us parted with the rest on the steps of
the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and
pursued our stroll through the gate of San
Lorenzo out upon the Campagna, which
tempts and tempts the sojourner at Rome,
until at last he must go and see — if it will
give him the fever. And, alas ! there I
caught the Roman fever — the longing that
burns one who has once been in Rome to go
again — that will not be cured by all the
cool contemptuous things he may think or
say of the Etenial City ; that fills him with
fond memories of its fascination, and makes
it for ever desired.

We walked far down the dusty road be-
yond the city walls, and then struck out
from the highway across the wild meadows
of the Campagna. They were weedy and
desolate, seamed by shaggy grass-grown
ditches, and deeply pitted with holes made

210 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

in search for catacombs. There was here
and there a farm-house amid the wide lone-
someness, but oftener a round, hollow, roof-
less tomb, from which the dust and memory
of the dead had long been blown away, and
through the top of which — fringed and over-
hung with grasses, and opening like a great
eye — the evening sky looked marvellously
sad. One of the fields was full of grim,
wide-horned cattle, and in another there
were four or five buffaloes lying down and
chewing their cuds, — holding their heads
horizontally in the air, and, with an air
of gloomy wickedness which nothing could
exceed in their cruel black eyes, glancing
about in visible pursuit of some object to
toss and gore. There were also many cane-
brakes, in which the wind made a mournful
rustling after the sun had set in golden
glitter on the roofs of the Roman churches
and the transparent night had fallen upon
the scene.

In all our ramble we met not a soul,
and I scarcely know what it is makes this
walk upon the Campagna one of my vivid-
est recollections of Rome, unless it be the
opportunity it gave me to weary myself
upon that many-memoried ground as freely
as if it had been a woods-pasture in Ohio.

ROMAN PEARLS. 211

Nature, where history was so august, was
perfectly simple and motherly, and did
so much to make me at home, that, as the
night thickened and we plunged here and
there into ditches and climbed fences, and
struggled, heavy-footed, back through the
suburbs to the city gate, I felt as if half
my boyhood had been passed upon the Cam-
pagna.

PASQUIXO, like most other great people,
is not very interesting upon close approach.
There is no trace now in his aspect to show
that he has ever been satirical ; but the
humanity that the sculptor gave him is im-
perishable, though he has lost all character
as a public censor. The torso is at first
glance nothing but a shapeless mass of stone,
but the life can never die out of that which
has been shaped by art to the likeness of a
man, and a second look restores the lump to
full possession of form and expression. For
this reason I lament that statues should
ever be restored except by sympathy and
imagination.

REGARDING the face of Pompey's statue in

212 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

the Spada Palace, I was more struck than
ever with a resemblance to American poli-
ticians which I had noted in all the Roman
statues. It is a type of face not now to be
found in Rome, but frequent enough here,
and rather in the South than in the North.
Pompey was like the pictures of so many
Southern Congressmen that I wondered
whether race had not less to do with pro-
ducing types than had similarity of circum-
stances ; whether a republicanism based
upon slavery could not so far assimilate
character as to produce a common aspect
in people widely separated by time and
creeds, but having the same unquestioned
habits of command, and the same boundless
and unscrupulous ambition.

XII.

WHEN the Tiber, according to its frequent
habit, rises and inundates the city, the Pan-
theon is one of the first places to be flooded
— the sacristan told us. The water climbs
above the altar-tops, sapping, in its reces-
sion, the cement of the fine marbles which
incrust the columns, so that about their
bases the pieces have to be continually re-
newed. Nothing vexes you so much in the
Pantheon as your consciousness of these and

ROMAN PEARLS. 213

other repairs. Bad as ruin is, I think I
would rather have the old temple ruinous
in every part than restored as you find it.
The sacristan felt the wrongs of the place
keenly, and said, referring to the removal
of the bronze roof, which took place some
centuries ago, "They have robbed us of
everything" (Ci hanno levato tutto) ; as if he
and the Pantheon were of one blood, and he
had suffered personal hurt in its spoliation.

What a sense of the wildness everywhere
lurking about Borne we had given us by
that group of peasants who had built a fire
of brushwood almost within the portico of
the Pantheon, and were cooking their sup-
per at it, the light of the flames luridly
painting their swarthy faces !

XIII.

POOR little Numero Cinque Via del Gam-
bero has seldom, I imagine, known so vio-
lent a sensation as that it experienced when,
on the day of the Immaculate Conception,
the Armenian Archbishop rolled up to the
door in his red coach. The master of the
house had always seemed to like us ; now
he appeared with profound respect suffus-
ing, as it were, his whole being, and an-
nounced, " Signore, it is Monsignore come

214 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

to take you to the Sistine Chapel in his
carriage," and drew himself up in a line, as
much like a series of serving-men as
possible, to let us pass out. There was a
private carriage for the ladies near that of
Monsignore, for he had already advertised
us that the sex were not permitted to ride
in the red coach. As they appeared, how-
ever, he renewed his expressions of deso-
lation at being deprived of their company,
and assured them of his good-will with a
multiplicity of smiles and nods, intermixed
with shrugs of recurrence to his poignant
regret. But ! In fine, it was forbidden !

Monsignore was in full costume, with his
best ecclesiastical clothes on, and with his
great gold chain about his neck. The dress
was richer than that of the western arch-
bishops ; and the long white beard of Mon-
signore made him look much more like
a Scriptural monsignore than these. He
lacked, perhaps, the fine spiritual grace of
his brother, the Archbishop at Venice, to
whose letter of introduction we owed his
acquaintance and untiring civilities ; but if
a man cannot be plump and spiritual, he
can be plump and pleasant, as Monsignore
was to the last degree. He enlivened our
ride with discourse about the Armenians at

ROMAN PEARLS. 215

Venice, equally beloved of us ; and, arrived
at the Sistiiie Chapel, he marshalled the
ladies before him, and won them early
entrance through the crowd of English
people crushing one another at the door.
Then he laid hold upon the captain of the
Swiss Guard, who was swift to provide
them with the best places ; and in nowise
did he seem one of the uiiinfluential and
insignificant priests that About describes
the archbishops at Rome to be. According
to this lively author, a Swiss guard was
striking back the crowd on some occasion
with the butt of his halberd, and smote
a cardinal on the breast. He instantly
dropped upon his knees, with " Pardon,
Eminenza ! I thought it was a mon-
signore ! " Even the chief of these hand-
some fellows had nothing but respect and
obedience for our Archbishop.

The gentlemen present were separated
from the ladies, and in a very narrow space
outside of the chapel men of every nation
were penned up together. All talked —
several priests as loudly as the rest. But
the rudest among them were certain Ger-
mans, who not only talked but stood upon
a seat to see better, and were ordered
down by one of the Swiss with a fierce

216 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

" Giii, signore, giii ! " Otherwise the guard
kept good order in the chapel, and were no
doubt as useful and genuine as anything
about the poor old Pope. What gorgeous
fellows they were, and, as soldiers, how
absurd ! The weapons they bore were as
obsolete as the excommunication. It was
amusing to pass one of these play -soldiers
on guard at the door of the Vatican — tall,
straight, beautiful, superb, with his halberd
on his shoulder — and then come to a real
warrior outside, a little, ugly, red-legged
French sentinel, with his Mini£ on his arm.
Except for the singing of the Pope's choir
— which was angelically sweet, and heavenly
far abo\re all praise — the religious cere-
monies affected me, like all others of that
faith, as tedious and empty. Each of the
cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a
sonorous nose ; and was received standing
by his brother prelates — a grotesque com-
pany of old-womanish old men in gaudy
gowns. One of the last to come was Anto-
nelli, who has the very wickedest face in
the world. He sat with his eyes fastened
upon his book, but obviously open at every
pore to all that went on about him. As he
passed out he cast gleaming, terrible, sidelong
looks upon the people, full of hate and guile.

ROMAN PEARLS. 217

From where I stood I saw the Pope's face
only iu profile : it was gentle and benign
enough, but not great in expression, and
the smile on it almost degenerated into a
simper. His Holiness had a cold ; and his
recitative, though full, was not smooth. He
was all priest when, in the midst of the ser-
vice, he hawked, held his handkerchief up
before his face, a little way off, and ruth-
lessly spat in it !

FORZA MAGGIORE.

I IMAGINE that Grossetto is not a town
much known to travel, for it is absent
from all the guide-books I have looked at.
However, it is chief in the Maremma, where
sweet Pia de' Tolommei languished and per-
ished of the poisonous air and her love's
cruelty, and where, so many mute centuries
since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell.
Further, one may say that Grossetto is on
the diligence road from Civita Vecchia to
Leghorn, and that in the very heart of the
place there is a lovely palm-tree, rare, if
not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands
in a well-sheltered, dull little court, out of
everything's way, and turns tenderly to-
ward the wall that shields it on the north.
It has no other company but a beautiful
young girl, who leans out of a window high
over its head, and I have no doubt talks
with it. At the moment we discovered the
friends, the maiden was looking patheti-

FORZA MAGGIORE. 219

cally to the northward, while the palm softly
stirred and opened its plumes, as a bird does
when his song is finished ; and there is very
little question but it had just been singing
to her that song of which the palms are so
fond —

" Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Xorden auf kahler Hoh'."

C4rossetto does her utmost to hide the
secret of this tree's existence, as if a hard,
matter-of-fact place ought to be ashamed of
a sentimentality of the kind. It pretended
to be a very worldly town, and tried to keep
us in the neighbourhood of its cathedral,
where the caffe and shops are, and where,
in the evening, four or five officers of the
garrison clinked their sabres on the stones,
and promenaded up and down, and as many
ladies shopped for gloves ; and as many citi-
zens sat at the principal caffe and drank
black coffee. This was lively enough ; and
we knew that the citizens were talking of
the last week's news and the Roman
question ; that the ladies were really looking
for loves, not gloves ; that such of the offi-
cers as had no local intrigue to keep their
hearts at rest were terribly bored, and longed
for Florence or Milan or Turin.

Besides the social charms of her piazza,

'220 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

Grossetto put forth others of au artistic
nature. The cathedral was very old and
very beautiful, — built of alternate lines of
red and white marble, and lately restored in
the best spirit of fidelity and reverence.
But it was not open, and we were obliged to
turn from it to the group of statuary in the
middle of the piazza, representative of the
Maremma and Family returning thanks to
the Grand Duke Leopold in. of Tuscany for
his goodness in causing her swamps to be
drained. The Maremma and her children
are arrayed in the scant draperies of
Allegory, but the Grand Duke is fully
dressed, and is shown looking down with
some surprise at their figures, and with a
visible doubt of the propriety of their public
appearance in that state.

There was also a Museum at Grossetto,
and I wonder what was in it ?

The wall of the town was perfect yet,
though the moat at its feet had been so long
dry that it was only to be known from the
adjacent fields by the richness of its soil.
The top of the wall had been levelled, and
planted with shade, and turned into a peace-
ful promenade, like most of such mediaeval
defences in Italy ; though I am not sure
that a little military life did not still linger

FORZA MAGGIORE. ±21

about a bastion here and there. From
somewhere, when we strolled out early in
the morning, to walk upon the wall, there
came to us a throb of drums ; but I believe
that the only armed men we saw, beside the
officers in the piazza, were the numerous
sportsmen resorting at that season to Gros-
setto for the excellent shooting in the
marshes. All the way to Florence we con-
tinued to meet them and their dogs ; and
our inn at Grossetto overflowed with abund-
ance of game. On the kitchen floor and in
the court were heaps of larks, pheasants,
quails, and beccafichi, at which a troop of
scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from
which the great, noble, beautiful, white-
aproned cook for ever fried, stewed, broiled,
and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these
generous birds during our sojourn, and
found, when we attempted to vary our bill
of fare, that the very genteel waiter attend-
ing us had few distinct ideas beyond them.
He was part of the repairs and improve-
ments which that hostelry had recently
undergone, and had evidently come in with
the four-pronged forks, the chrome-litho-
graphs of Victor Emanuel, Garibaldi, Sol-
ferino, and Magenta in the large dining-room,
and the iron stove in the small one. He had

222 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

nothing, evidently, in common with the
brick floors of the bedchambers, and the
ancient rooms with great fire-places. He
strove to give a Florentine blandishment to
the rusticity of life in the Maremma ; and
we felt sure that he must know what beef-
steak was. When we ordered it, he assumed
to be perfectly conversant with it, started
to bring it, paused, turned, and, with a
great sacrifice of personal dignity, demanded
" Blfsteca di manzo, o bifsteca di motone?"
— " Beefsteak of beef, or beefsteak of mut-
ton?"

Of Grossetto proper, that is all I remem-
ber, if I except a boy whom I heard singing
after dark in the streets —

" Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi ! "

The cause of our sojourn there was an
nstance of form, mayyiore, as the agent of
the diligence company defiantly expressed
it, in refusing us damages for our overturn
into the river. It was in the early part of
the winter when we started from Rome for
Venice, and we were travelling northward
by diligence because the railways were still
more or less interrupted by the storms and
floods predicted of Matthieu de la Dr6me, —
the only reliable prophet France has pro-

FOR/A MAGGIOKE. 223

cluced since Voltaire ; — and if our accident
was caused by an overruling Providence, the
company, according to the very law of its
existence, was not responsible. To be sure,
we did not see how an overruling Providence
was to blame for loading upon our diligence
the baggage of two diligences, or for the
clumsiness of our driver ; but on the other
hand, It is certain that the company did not
make it rain or cause the inundation. And,
in fine, although we could not have travelled
by railway, we were masters to have taken
the steamer instead of the diligence at Civita
Vecchia.

The choice of either of these means of
travel had presented itself in vivid hues of
disadvantage all the way from Rome to the
Papal port, where the French steamer for
Leghorn lay dancing a hornpipe upon the
short, chopping waves, while we approached
by railway. We had leisure enough to
make the decision, if that was all we wanted.
Our engine-driver had derived his ideas of
progress from an Encyclical Letter, and the
train gave every promise of arriving at
Civita Vecchia five hundred years behind
time. But such was the desolating and
depressing influence of the weather and the
landscape, that we reached Civita Vecchia

224 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

as undecided as we had left Rome. On the
one hand, there had been the land, soaked
and sodden, — wild, shagged with scrubby
growths of timber and brooded over by
sullen clouds, and visibly inhabited only by
shepherds, leaning upon their staves at an
angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in
their immovable dejection, with their legs
wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like
satyrs that had been converted, and were
trying to do right ; turning dim faces to us,
they warned us with every mute appeal
against the land, as a waste of mud from
one end of Italy to the other. On the other
hand, there was the sea- wind raving about
our train and threatening to blow it over,
and, whenever we drew near the coast, heap-
iug the waves upon the beach in thundering
menace.

We weakly and fearfully remembered our
former journeys by diligence over broken
railway routes ; we recalled our cruel voy-
age from Genoa to Naples by sea ; and in a
state of pitiable dismay we ate five francs'
worth at the restaurant of the Civita Vecchia
station before we knew it, and long before
we had made up our minds. Still we might
have lingered and hesitated, and perhaps re-
turned to Rome at last, but for the dramatic

FORZA MAGGIORE. 1*25

resolution of the old man who solicited pas-
sengers for the diligence, and carried their
passports for a final Papal visa at the police-
office. By the account he gave of himself,
he was one of the best men in the world,
and unique in those parts for honesty and
truthfulness ; and he besought us, out of
that affectionate interest with which our
very aspect had inspired him, not to go by
steamer, but to go by diligence, which in
nineteen hours would land us safe, and ab-
solutely refreshed by the journey, at the
station in Follonica. And now, once, would
we go by diligence? twice, would we go?
three times, would we go ?

" Signore," said our benefactor angrily, " I
lose my time with you ;" and ran away, to
be called back in the course of destiny, as
he knew well enough, and besought to take
us as a special favour.

From the passports he learned that there
was official dignity among us, and addressed
the unworthy bearer of public honours as
Eccellenza, and, at parting, bequeathed his
advantage to the conductor, commending us
all in set terms to his courtesy. He hovered
caressingly about us as long as we remained,
straining politeness to do us some last little
service ; and when the diligence rolled away,

VOL. i. P

226 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

he did all that one man could to give us a
round of applause.

We laughed together at this silly old man,
when out of sight ; but we confessed that,
if travel in our own country ever came, with
advancing corruption, to be treated with the
small deceits practised upon it in Italy, it
was not likely to be treated with the small
civilities also there attendant on it, — and so
tried to console ourselves.

At the moment of departure we were sur-
prised to have enter the diligence a fellow-
countryman, whom we had first seen on the
road from Naples to Rome. He had since
crossed our path with that iteration of travel
which brings you again and again in view of
the same trunks and the same tourists in
the round of Europe, and finally in Civita
Yecchia he had turned up, a silent spectator
of our scene with the agent of the diligence,
and had gone off apparently a confirmed
passenger by steamer. Perhaps a nearer
view of the sailor's hornpipe, as danced by
that vessel in the harbour, shook his resolu-
tion. At any rate, here he was again, and
with his ticket for Follonica, — a bright-eyed,
rosy-cheeked man, and we will say a citizen
of Portland, though he was not. For the
first time in our long acquaintance with one

FORZA MAGGIORE. 227

another's faces, we entered into conversa-
tion, and wondered whether we should find
brigands or anything to eat on the road,
without expectation of finding either. In
respect of robbers, we were not disap-
pointed ; but shortly after nightfall we
stopped at a lonely post-house to change
horses, and found that the landlord had so
far counted on our appearance as to have,
just roasted and fragrantly fuming, a leg of
lamb, with certain small fried fish, and a
sufficiency of bread. It was a very lonely
place, as I say ; the sky was gloomy over-
head ; and the wildness of the landscape all
about us gave our provision quite a gamy
flavour ; and brigands could have added
nothing to our sense of solitude.

The road creeps along the coast for some
distance from Civita Vecchia, within hearing
of the sea, and nowhere widely forsakes it,
I believe, all the way to Follonica. The
country is hilly, and we stopped every two
hours to change horses ; at which times we
looked out, and, seeing that it was a grey
and windy night, though not rainy, exulted
that we had not taken the steamer. With
very little change, the wisdom of our decision
in favour of the diligence formed the burden
of our talk during the whole night ; and to

228 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

think of eluded sea-sickness requited us in
the agony of our break-neck efforts to catch
a little sleep, as, mounted upon our night-
mares, we rode steeplechases up and down
the highways and byways of horror. Any-
thing that absolutely awakened us was
accounted a blessing ; and I remember few
things in life with so keen a pleasure as the
summons that came to us to descend from
our places and cross a river in one boat,
while the two diligences of our train followed
in another. Here we had time to see our
fellow-passengers, as the pulsating light of
their cigars illumined their faces, and to
discover among them that Italian, common
to all large companies, who speaks English,
and is very eager to practise it with you, —
who is such a benefactor if you do not know
his own language, and such a bore if you do.
After this, being landed, it was rapture to
stroll up and down the good road, and feel
it hard and real under our feet, and not an
abysmal impalpability, while all the grim
shapes of our dreams fled to the spectral
line of small boats sustaining the ferry -barge,
and swaying slowly from it as the drowned
men at their keels tugged them against the
tide.

"5" accommodino, siynoii!" cries the

FORZA MAGGIORE. 229

cheerful voice of the conductor, and we
ascend to our places in the diligence. The
nightmares are brought out again ; we
mount, and renew the steeplechase as be-
fore.

Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we
sit wide awake in the diligence, amid a
silence only broken by the hiss of rain
against the windows, and the sweep of
gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands
still ; there is no rattle of harness, nor other
sound to prove that we have arrived at the
spot by other means than dropping from the
clouds. The idea that we are passengers
in the last diligence destroyed before the
Deluge, and are now waiting our fate on the
highest ground accessible to wheels, fades
away as the day dimly breaks, and we find
ourselves planted, as the Italians say, on
the banks of another river. There is no
longer any visible conductor, the horses have
been spirited away, the driver has vanished.

The rain beats and beats upon the roof,
and begins to drop through upon us in great,
wrathful tears, while the river before us
rushes away with a momently swelling flood.
Enter now from the depths of the storm, a
number of rainy peasants, with our con-
ductor and driver perfectly water-logged,

230 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

and group themselves on the low, muddy
shore, near a flat ferry -barge, evidently want-
ing but a hint of /orza maggiore to go down
with anything put into it. A moment they
dispute in pantomime, sending now and then
a windy tone of protest and expostulation to
our ears, and then they drop into a motion-
less silence, and stand there in the tem-
pest, not braving it, but enduring it with the
pathetic resignation of their race, as if it
were some form of hopeless political oppres-
sion. At last comes the conductor to us
and says, It is impossible for our diligences
to cross in the boat, and he has sent for
others to meet us on the opposite shore. He
expected them long before this, but we see !
They are not come. Patience and maledic-
tion !

Remaining planted in these unfriendly cir-
cumstances from four o'clock till ten, we
have still the effrontery to be glad that we
did not take the steamer. What a storm
that must be at sea ! When at last our
connecting diligences appear on the other
shore, we are almost light-hearted, and
make a jest of the Ombrone, as we peril-
ously pass it in the ferry-boat too weak for
our diligences. Between the landing and the
vehicles there is a space of heavy mud to

FORZA MAGGIORE. 231

cross, and when we reach them we find the
coupe appointed us occupied by three young
Englishmen, who insist that they shall be
driven to the boat. "With that graceful
superiority which endears their nation to
the world, and makes the travelling English-
man a universal favourite, they keep the
seats to which they have no longer any
right, while the tempest drenches the ladies
to whom the places belong ; and it is only
by theforza maygiore of our conductor that
they can be dislodged. In the meantime
the Portland man exchanges with them the
assurances of personal and national esteem,
which that mighty bond of friendship, the
language of Shakespeare and Milton, enables
us to offer so idiomatically to our transatlan-
tic cousins.

What Grossetto was like, as we first rode
through it, we scarcely looked to see. In
four or five hours we should strike the rail-
road at Follonica ; and we merely asked of
intermediate places that they should not
detain us. We dined in Grossetto at an inn
of the Larthian period, — a cold inn and a
damp, which seemed never to have been
swept since the broom dropped from the
grasp of the last Etrurian chambermaid, —
and we ate with the two-pronged iron forks

232 ITALIAN* JOURNEY*.

of an extinct civilisation. All the while we
dined, a boy tried to kindle a fire to warm
us, and beguiled his incessant failures with
stories of inundation on the road ahead of
us. But we believed him so little, that
when he said a certain stream near Gros-
setto was impassable, our company all but
hissed him.

When we left the town and hurried into
the open country, we perceived that he had
only too great reason to be an alarmist.
Every little rill wras risen, and boiling over
with the pride of harm, and the broad fields
lay hid under the yellow waters that here
and there washed over the road. Yet the
freshet only presented itself to us as a plea-
sant excitement ; and even when we came
to a place where the road itself was covered
for a quarter of a mile, we scarcely looked
outside the diligence to see how deep the
water was. We were surprised when our
horses were brought to a stand on a rising
ground, and the conductor, cap in hand,
appeared at the door. He was a fat, well-
natured man, full of a smiling good -will ;
and he stood before us in a radiant des-
peration.

Would Eccellenza descend, look at the
water in front, and decide whether to go

FORZA MAGGIORE. 233

011 ? The conductor desired to content ; it
displeased him to delay, — ma, in somma!
— the rest was confided to the conductor's
eloquent shoulders and eyebrows.

Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a dis-
heartening prospect. On every hand the
country was under water. The two dili-
gences stood on a stone bridge spanning the
stream, that, now swollen to an angry tor-
rent, brawled over a hundred yards of the
road before us. Beyond, the ground rose,
and on its slope stood a farm-house up to its
second story in water. Without the slight-
est hope in his purpose, and merely as an
experiment, Eccellenza suggested that a man
should be sent in on horseback ; which being
done, man and horse in a moment floundered
into swimming-depths.

The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccel-
lenza, gave a great shrug of desolation.

Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's
broken shrug, — a shrug of sufficiently cor-
rect construction, but wanting the tonic
accent, as one may say, though expressing,
however imperfectly, an equal desolation.

It appeared to be the part of wisdom not
to go ahead, but to go back if we could ; and
we re-entered the water we had just crossed.
It had risen a little meanwhile, and the road

234 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

could now be traced only by the telegraph-
poles. The diligence before us went safely
through ; but our driver, trusting rather to
inspiration than precedent, did not follow it
carefully, and directly drove us over the
side of a small viaduct. All the baggage of
the train having been lodged upon the roof
of our diligence, the unwieldy vehicle now
lurched heavily, hesitated, as if preparing,
like Csesar, to fall decently, and went over
on its side with a stately deliberation that
gave us ample time to arrange our plans for
getting out.

The torrent was only some three feet
deep, but it was swift and muddy, and it
was with a fine sense of shipwreck that
Eccellenza felt his boots filling with water,
while a conviction that it would have been
better, after all, to have taken the steamer,
struck coldly home to him. We opened
the window in the top side of the diligence,
and lifted the ladies through it, and the
conductor, in the character of lifeboat, bore
them ashore ; while the driver cursed his
horses in a sullen whisper, and could with
difficulty be diverted from that employment
to cut the lines and save one of them from
drowning.

Here our compatriot, whose conversation

FORZA MAGGIORE. 235

with the Englishman at the Ombrone we
had lately admired, showed traits of strict
and severe method which afterward came
into even bolder relief. The ladies being
rescued, he applied himself to the rescue of
their hats, cloaks, rubbers, muffs, books,
and bags, and handed them up through the
window with tireless perseverance, making
an effort to wring or dry each article in turn.
The other gentleman on top received them
all rather grimly, and had not perhaps been
amused by the situation but for the exploit
of his hat. It was of the sort called in Ital-
ian as in English slang a stove-pipe (canna),
and having been made in Italy, it was of
course too large for its wearer. It had
never been anything but a horror and re-
proach to him, and he was now inexpressibly
delighted to see it steal out of the diligence
in company with one of the red-leather
cushions, and glide darkly down the flood.
It nodded and nodded to the cushion with a
superhuman tenderness and elegance, and
had a preposterous air of whispering, as it
drifted out of sight—
" It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles, —
It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down."

The romantic interest of this episode had
hardly died away, when our adventure ac-

236 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

quired an idyllic flavour from the appearance
on the scene of four peasants in an ox-cart.
These the conductor tried to engage to
bring out the baggage and right the fallen
diligence ; and they, after making him a
little speech upon the value of their health,
which might be injured, asked him, tenta-
tively, two hundred francs for the service.
The simple incident enforced the fact al-
ready known to us, — that, if Italians some-
times take advantage of strangers, they are
equally willing to prey upon each other ;
but I doubt if anything could have taught a
foreigner the sweetness with which our con-
ductor bore the enormity, and turned quietly
from those brigands to carry the Portland
man from th ^ wreck, on which he lingered,
to the shore.

Here in the gathering twilight the passen-
gers of both diligences grouped themselves,
and made merry over the common disaster.
As the conductor and the drivers brought
off the luggage, our spirits rose with the ar-
rival of each trunk, and we were pleased or
not as we found it soaked or dry. We ap-
plauded and admired the greater sufferers
among us : a lady who opened a dripping
box was felt to have perpetrated a plea-
santry ; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose

FORZA MAGGIORE. 237

luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered
in the flood about the diligence, was looked
upon as a very subtle humorist. Our
own contribution to these witty passages
was the epigrammatic display of a reeking
trunk full of the pretty rubbish people bring
away from Rome and Naples, — copies of
Pompeian frescoes more ruinous than the
originals ; photographs floating loose from
their cards ; little earthen busts reduced to
the lumpishness of common clay ; Roman
scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory
of their recent hues ; Roman pearls clinging
together in clammy masses.

We were a band of brothers and sisters,
as we all crowded into one diligence and re-
turned to Grossetto. Arrived there, our
party, knowing that a public conveyance in
Italy— and everywhere else — always stops
at the worst inn in a place, made bold to
seek another, and found it without ado,
though the person who undertook to show
it spoke of it mysteriously and as of diffi-
cult access, and tried to make the simple
affair as like a scene of grand opera as he
could.

We took one of the ancient rooms in
which there was a vast fire-place, as already
mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire

238 ITALIAN JOURXEYS.

as could not have been known in that fuel-
sparing land for ages. The drying of the
clothes was an affair that drew out all the
energy and method of our compatriot, and at
a late hour we left him moving about among
the garments that dangled and dripped from
pegs and hooks and lines, dealing with them
as a physician with his sick, and tenderly
nursing his dress-coat, which he wrung and
shook and smoothed and pulled this way
and that with a never-satisfied anxiety. At
midnight, he hired a watcher to keep up

• the fire and turn the steaming raiment, and,
returning at four o'clock, found his watcher
dead asleep before the empty fire-place. But
I rather applaud than blame the watcher for
this. He must have been a man of iron
nerve to fall asleep amid all the phantasmal
show of masks and disguises. What if those
reeking silks had forgotten their nails, and,
decking themselves with the blotted Roman
scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, had in-

* vited the dress-coats to look over the drip-
ping photographs ? Or if all those drowned
garments had assumed the characters of the
people whom they had grown to resemble,
and had sat down to hear the shade of Pia
de' Tolommei rehearse the story of her sad
fate in the Maremma ?— I say, if a watcher

FORZA MAGGIORE. 239

could sleep in such company, he was right
to do so.

On the third day after our return to Gros-
setto, we gathered together our damaged
effects, and packed them into refractory
trunks. Then we held the customary dis-
cussion with the landlord concerning the
effrontery of his account, and drove off once
more toward Follonica. We could scarcely
recognise the route for the one we had re-
cently passed over ; and it was not until we
came to the scene of our wreck, and found
the diligence stranded high and dry upon
the roadside, that we could believe the
whole landscape about us had been flooded
three days before. The offending stream
had shrunk back to its channel, and now
seemed to feign an unconsciousness of its
late excess, and had a virtuous air of not
knowing how in the world to account for that
upturned diligence. The waters, we learned,
had begun to subside the night after our
disaster ; and the vehicle might have been
righted and drawn off — for it was not in
the least injured — forty-eight hours previ-
ously ; but I suppose it was not en regie to
touch it without orders from Rome. I
picture it to myself still lying there, in the

249 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

heart of the marshes, and thrilling sym-
pathetic travel with the spectacle of its
ultimate ruin —

" Disfecemi Maremma."

We reached Folloiiica at last, and then
the cars hurried us to Leghorn. We were
thoroughly humbled in spirit, and had no
longer any doubt that we did ill to take the
diligence at Civita Vecchia instead of the
steamer ; for we had been, not nineteen
hours, but four days on the road, and we had
suffered as afore-mentioned.

But we were destined to be partially
restored to our self-esteem, if not entirely
comforted for our losses, when we sat down
to dinner in the Hotel Washington, and the
urbane head-waiter, catching the drift of our
English discourse, asked us —

" Have the signori heard that the French
steamer, which left Civita Vecchia the same
day with their diligence, had to put back
and lie in port more than two days on
account of the storm? She is but now
come into Leghorn, after a very dangerous

AT PADUA.

THOSE of my readers who have frequented
the garden of Doctor Rappaccini no
doubt recall with perfect distinctness the
quaint old city of Padua. They remember
its miles and miles of dim arcade over-roof-
ing the side-walks everywhere, affording ex-
cellent opportunity for the flirtation of
lovers by day and the vengeance of rivals
by night. They have seen the now-vacant
streets thronged with maskers, and the
Venetian Podesta going in gorgeous state
to and from the vast Palazzo della Ragione.
They have witnessed ringing tournaments in
those sad empty squares, and races in the
Prato della Valle, and many other wonders
of different epochs, and their pleasure makes
me half -sorry that I should have lived for
several years within an hour by rail from
Padua, and should know little or nothing of
these great sights from actual observation.
I take shame to myself for having visited
VOL. i. Q

242 ITALIAN JOURXEYS.

Padua so often and so familiarly as I used
to do, — for having been bored and hungry
there, — for having had toothache there, upon
one occasion,— for having rejoiced more in a
cup of coffee at Pedrocchi's than in the
whole history of Padua, — for .having slept
repeatedly in the bad -bedded hotels of
Padua, and never once dreamt of Portia, —
for having been more taken by the salti
mortal!1 of a waiter who summed up my
account at a Paduan restaurant, than by all
the strategies with which the city has been
many times captured and recaptured. Had
I viewed Padua only over the wall of Doctor
Rappaccini's garden, how different my im-
pressions of the city would now be ! This
is one of the drawbacks of actual knowledge.
" Ah ! how can you write about Spain when
once you have been there ?" asked Heine of
Theophile Gautier setting out on a journey
thither.

Nevertheless it seems to me that I remem-
ber something about Padua with a sort of
romantic pleasure. There was a certain
charm, which I can dimly recall, in saunter -

1 Salti mortali are those prodigious efforts of men-
tal arithmetic by which Italian waiters, in verbally
presenting your account, arrive at six as the product
of two and two.

AT PADUA. 243

ing along the top of the old wall of the city,
and looking down upon the plumy crests of
the Indian corn that flourished up so mightily
from the diy bed of the moat. At such
times I could not help figuring to myself the
many sieges that the wall had known, with
the fierce assault by day, the secret attack
by night, the swarming foe upon the plains
below, the bristling arms of the besieged
upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars
made of ropes and leather and throwing
mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of
arrows, the ladders planted against the
defences and staggering headlong into the
moat, enriched for future agriculture not
only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood
of many men. I suppose that most of these
visions were old stage spectacles furbished
up anew, and that my armies were chiefly
equipped with their obsolete implements of
warfare from museums of armour and from
cabinets of antiquities ; but they were very
vivid for all that.

I was never able, in passing a certain one
of the city gates, to divest myself of an
historic interest in the great loads of hay
waiting admission on the outside. For an
instant they masked again the Venetian
troops that, in the War of the League of

244 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

Cambray, entered the city in the hay-carts,
shot down the landsknechts at the gates,
and, uniting with the citizens, cut the Ger-
man garrison to pieces. But it was a thing
long past. The German garrison was here
again ; and the heirs of the landsknechts
went clanking through the gate to the
parade-ground, with that fierce clamour of
their kettle-drums which is so much fiercer
because unmingled with the noise of fifes.
Once more now the Germans are gone, and,
let us trust, for ever ; but when I saw them,
there seemed little hope of their going.
They had a great Biergarten on the top of the
wall, and they had set up the altars of their
heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city.

I please myself with thinking that, if I
walked on such a spring day as this in the
arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch
glimpses, through the gateways of the pal-
aces, of gardens full of vivid bloom, and
of fountains that tinkle there for ever. If
it were autumn, and I were in the great
market-place before the Palazzo della
Ragione, I should hear the baskets of
amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming
with the murmur of multitudinous bees,
and making a music as if the wine itself
were already singing in their gentle hearts.

AT PADUA. 245

It is a great field of succulent verdure,
that wide old market-place ; and fancy
loves to browse about among its gay stores
of fruits and vegetables, brought thither
by the world-old peasant-women who have
been bringing fruits and vegetables to the
Paduaii market for so many centuries. They
sit upon the ground before their great
panniers, and knit and doze, and wake up
with a drowsy ' ' Comandala ? " as you linger
to look at their grapes. They have each a
pair of scales, — the emblem of Injustice, —
and will weigh you out a scant measure of
the fruit if you like. Their faces are yellow
as parchment, and Time has written them
so full of wrinkles that there is not room
for another line. Doubtless these old parch-
ment visages are palimpsests, and would
tell the whole history of Padua if you could
get at each successive inscription. Among
their primal records there must be some ac-
count of the Roman city, as each little con-
tadinella remembered it on market-days ;
and one might read of the terror of Attila's
sack, a little later, with the peasant-maid's
personal recollection of the bold Hunnish
trooper who ate up the grapes in her basket,
and kissed her hard, round red cheeks, — for
in that time she was a blooming girl, — and

246 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

paid nothing for either privilege. What wild
and confused reminiscences on the wrinkled
visage we should find thereafter of the fierce
republican times, of Eccelino, of the Carraras,
of the Venetian rule ! And is it not sad to
think of systems and peoples all passing
away, and these ancient women lasting still,
and still selling grapes in front of the Palazzo
della Ragione ? What a long mortality !

The youngest of their number is a thou-
sand years older than the palace, which was
begun in the twelfth century, and which is
much the same now as it was when first
completed. I know that, if I entered it,
I should be sure of finding the great hall
of the palace — the vastest hall in the world
— dim and dull and dusty and delightful,
with nothing ha it except at one end Dona-
tello's colossal marble-headed wooden horse
of Troy, stared at from the other end by
the two dog-faced Egyptian women in basalt
placed there by Belzoni.

Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I
should have the Court of the University all
to myself, and might study unmolested the
blazons of the noble youth who have at-
tended the school in different centuries ever
since 1200, and have left their escutcheons
on the walls to commemorate them. At

AT PADUA. 24"

the foot of the stairway ascending to the
schools from the court is the statue of the
learned lady who was once a professor in the
University, and who, if her likeness belie
not her looks, must have given a great charm
to student life in other times. At present
there are no lady professors at Padua any
more than at Harvard ; and during late years
the schools have suffered greatly from the
interference of the Austrian Government,
which frequently closed them for months, on
account of political demonstrations among
the students. But now there is an end of
this and many other stupid oppressions ; and
the time-honoured University will doubtless
regain its ancient importance. Even in 1864
it had nearly fifteen hundred students, and
one met them everywhere under the arcades,
and could not well mistake them, with that
blended air of pirate and dandy which these
studious young men loved to assume. They
were to be seen a good deal on the pro-
menades outside the walls, where the Paduan
ladies are driven in their carriages in the
afternoon, and where one sees the blood-
horses and fine equipages for which Padua is
famous. There used once to be races in the
Prato della Valle, after the Italian notion of
horse-races ; but these are now discontinued,

248 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

and there is nothing to be found there but
the statues of scholars and soldiers and states-
men, posted in a circle around the old race-
course. If you strolled thither about dusk
on such a day as this, you might see the
statues unbend a little from their stony
rigidity, and in the failing light nod to each
other very pleasantly through the trees.
And if you stayed in Padua over night, what
could be better to-morrow morning than a
stroll through the great Botanical Garden —
the oldest botanical garden in the world, —
the garden which first received in Europe the
strange and splendid growths of our hemi-
sphere,— the garden where Doctor Rappaccini
doubtless found the germ of his mortal plant ?

On the whole, I believe I would rather go
this moment to Padua than to Lowell or
Lawrence, or even to Worcester ; and as to
the disadvantage of having seen Padua, I
begin to think the whole place has now as-
sumed so fantastic a character in my mind
that I am almost as well qualified to write
of it as if I had merely dreamed it.

The day that we first visited the city was
very rainy, and we spent most of the time in
viewing the churches. These, even after the
churches of Venice, one finds rich in art and
historic interest, and they in no instance fall

AT PADUA. 249

into the maniacal excesses of the Renaissance
to which some of the temples of the latter
city abandon themselves. Their architecture
forms a sort of border-land between the
Byzantine of Venice and the Lombardic of
Verona. The superb domes of St. Anthony's
emulate those of St. Mark's ; and the porti-
coes of other Paduan churches rest upon the
backs of bird-headed lions and leopards that
fascinate with their mystery and beauty.

It was the wish to see the attributive Giot-
tos in the Chapter which drew us first to St.
Anthony's, and we saw them with the satis-
faction naturally attending the contempla-
tion of frescoes discovered only since 1858,
after having been hidden under plaster and
whitewash for many centuries ; but we could
not believe that Giotto's fame was destined
to gain much by their rescue from oblivion.
They are in nowise to be compared with
this master's frescoes in the Chapel of the
Annunziata, — which, indeed, is in every way
a place of wonder and delight. You reach
it by passing through a garden lane bordered
with roses, and a taciturn gardener comes
out with clinking keys, and lets you into the
chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and
Dante, nor seems to have been for ages.
Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as a

250 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

sacred place should be ; a blessed benching
goes round the walls, and you sit down and
take unlimited comfort in the frescoes. The
gardener leaves you alone to the solitude and
the silence, in which the talk of the painter
and the exile is plain enough. Their con-
temporaries and yours are cordial in their gay
companionship : through the half-open door
falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine
that they saw lie there ; the deathless birds
that they heard sing out in the garden trees ;
it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown
so many hundred years ago that breathes
through all the lovely garden grounds.

But in the midst of this pleasant com-
munion with the past, you have a lurking
pain ; for you have hired your brougham by
the hour ; and you presently quit the Chapel
of Giotto on this account.

We had chosen our driver from among
many other drivers of broughams in the
vicinity of Pedrocchi's, because he had such
an honest look, and was not likely, we
thought, to deal unfairly with us.

"But first," said the signor who had
selected him, " how much is your brougham
an hour ? "

So and so.

" Show me the tariff of fares."

AT PADUA. 251

" There is no tariff."

" There is. Show it to me."

"It is lost, signor."

" I think not. It is here in this pocket.
Get it out."

The tariff appears, and with it the fact that
he had demanded just what the boatman of
the ballad received in gift, — thrice his fee.

The driver mounted his seat, and served
us so faithfully that day in Padua that we
took him the next day for Arqua. At the
end, when he had received his due, and a
handsome mancia besides, he was still un-
satisfied, and referred to the tariff in proof
that he had been underpaid. On that con-
fronted and defeated, he thanked us very cor-
dially, gave us the number of his brougham,
and begged us to ask for him when we came
next to Padua and needed a carriage.

From the Chapel of the Annunziata he
drove us to the Church of Santa Giustina,
where is a very famous and noble picture by
Romanino. But as this writing has nothing
in the world to do with art, I here dismiss
that subject, and with a gross and idle de-
light follow the sacristan down under the
church to the prison of Santa Giustina.

Of all the faculties of the mind there is
none so little fatiguing to exercise as mere

252 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

wonder ; and, for my own sake, I try always
to wonder at things without the least critical
reservation. I therefore, in the sense of deglu-
tition, bolted this prison at once, though subse-
quent experiences led me to look with grave
indigestion upon the whole idea of prisons,
their authenticity, and even their existence.
As far as mere dimensions are concerned,
the prison of Santa Giustina was not a hard
one to swallow, being only three feet wide
by about ten feet in length. In this limited
space, Santa Giustina passed five years of
the paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous and
a long-suffering prince, whom, singularly
enough, no historic artist has yet arisen to
whitewash), and was then brought out into
the larger cell adjoining, to suffer a blessed
martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the
sacristan said she was dashed to death 011
the stones, or cut to pieces with knives ; but,
whatever the form of martyrdom, an iron
ring in the ceiling was employed in it, as I
know from seeing the ring, — a curiously well-
preserved piece of ironmongery. Within
the narrow prison of the saint, and just
under the grating, through which the sacris-
tan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a
mountain of candle-drippings, — a monument
to the fact that faith still largely exists in

AT PADUA. 253

this doubting world. My own credulity,
not only with regard to this prison, but also
touching the coffin of St. Luke, which I saw
in the church, had so wrought upon the
esteem of the sacristan, that he now took
me to a well, into which, he said, had been
cast the bones of three thousand Christian
martyrs. He lowered a lantern into the
well, and assured me that, if I looked
through a certain screenwork there, I could
see the bones. On experiment I could not
see the bones, but this circumstance did not
cause me to doubt their presence, particu-
larly as I did see upon the screen a great
number of coins offered for the repose of the
martyrs' souls. I threw down some soldi,
and thus enthralled the sacristan.

If the signor cared to see prisons, he said,
the driver must take him to those of Eccelino,
at present the property of a private gentle-
man near by. As I had just bought a
history of Eccelino, at a great bargain, from
a second-hand book-stall, and had a lively
interest in all the enormities of that noble-
man, I sped the driver instantly to the villa
of the Signor P .

It depends here altogether upon the fresh-
ness or mustiiiess of the reader's historical
reading whether he cares to be reminded

254 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

more particularly who Eccelino was. He
flourished balefully in the early half of
the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza,
Verona, Padua, and Brescia, and was de-
feated and hurt to death in an attempt to
possess himself of Milan. He was in every
respect a remarkable man for that time, —
fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious,
hardy, and unspeakably ambitious and cruel.
He survived and suppressed innumerable
conspiracies, escaping even the thrust of
the assassin whom the fame of his enormous
wickedness had caused the Old Man of the
Mountain to send against him. As lord
of Padua he was more incredibly severe
and bloody in his rule than as lord of the
other cities, for the Paduans had been latest
free, and conspired the most frequently
against him. He extirpated whole families
on suspicion that a single member had been
concerned in a meditated revolt. Little
children and helpless women suffered hideous
mutilation and shame at his hands. Six
prisons in Padua were constantly filled by
his arrests. The whole country was traversed
by witnesses of his cruelties, — men and
women deprived of an arm or leg, and beg-
ging from door to door. He had long been
excommunicated ; at last the Church pro-

AT PADUA. 255

claimed a crusade against him, and his lieu-
tenant and nephew — more demoniacal, if
possible, than himself — was driven out of
Padua while he was operating against Man-
tua. Eccelino retired to Verona, and main-
tained a struggle against the crusade for
nearly two years longer, with a courage which
never failed him. Wounded and taken
prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious army
gathered about him, and heaped insult and
reproach upon him ; and one furious peasant,
whose brother's feet had been cut off by Eccel-
ino's command, dealt the helpless monster
four blows upon the head with a scythe. By
some, Eccelino is said to have died of these
wounds alone ; but by others it is related
that his death was a kind of suicide, inas-
much as he himself put the case past surgery
by tearing off the bandages from his hurts,
and refusing all medicines.

TI.
ENTERING at the enchanted portal of the

Villa P ,we found ourselves in a realm of

wonder. It was our misfortune not to see
the magician who compelled all the marvels
on which we looked, but for that very reason,
perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his
greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evi-

256 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

dences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy,
which everywhere tended to a monumental
and mortuary effect. A sort of vestibule
first received us, and beyond this dripped
and glimmered the garden. The walls of the
vestibule were covered with inscriptions set-
ting forth the sentiments of the philosophy
and piety of all ages concerning life and
death ; we began with Confucius, and we
ended with Benjamino Franklino. But as
if these ideas of mortality were not suffi-
ciently depressing, the funereal Signor P

had collected into earthen amphorce the
ashes of the most famous men of ancient and
modern times, and arranged them so that a
sense of their number and variety should at
once strike his visitor. Each jar was con-
spicuously labelled with the name its illus-
trious dust had borne in life ; and if one
escaped with comparative cheerfulness from
the thought that Seneca had died, there were
in the very next pot the cinders of Napoleon
to bully him back to a sense of his mortality.
We were glad to have the gloomy fascina-
tion of these objects broken by the custodian,
who approached to ask if we wished to see
the prisons of Eccelino, and we willingly fol-
lowed him into the rain out of our sepulchral
shelter.

AT PADUA. 257

Between the vestibule and the towers of
the tyrant lay that garden already men-
tioned, and our guide led us through ranks
of weeping statuary, and rainy bowers, and
showery lanes of shrubbery, until we reached
the door of his cottage. While he entered
to fetch the key to the prisons, we noted
that the towers were freshly painted and in
perfect repair ; and indeed the custodian
said frankly enough, on reappearing, that
they were merely built over the prisons on
the site of the original towers. The storied
stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps through
the grounds, and now, swollen by the rain-
fall, it roared, a yellow torrent, under a
corner of the prisons. The towers rise from
masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing
feature of what must be, in spite of Signer

P , a delightful Italian garden in sunny

weather. The ground is not so flat as else-
where in Padua, and this inequality gives
an additional picturesqueness to the place.
But as we were come in search of horrors,
we scorned these merely lovely things, and
hastened to immure ourselves hi the dun-
geons below. The custodian, lighting a
candle (which ought, we felt, to have been
a torch), went before.

We found the cells, though narrow and

VOL. I. R

258 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

dark, not uncomfortable, and the guide con-
ceded that they had undergone some repairs
since Eccelino's time. But all the horrors
for which we had come were there in per-
fect grisliness, and labelled by the ingenious
Signer P with Latin inscriptions.

In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin,
set in the wall. Beneath this, while the
wretched prisoner knelt in prayer, a trap-
door opened and precipitated him upon the
points of knives, from which his body fell
into the Bacchiglione below. In the next
cell, held by some rusty iron rings to the
wall, was a skeleton, hanging by the wrists.

"This," said the guide, "was another pun-
ishment of which Eccelino was very fond."

A dreadful doubt seized my mind. ' ' Was
this skeleton found here?" I demanded.

Without faltering an instant, without so
much as winking an eye, the custodian re-
plied, " Appunto."

It was a great relief, and restored me to
confidence in the establishment. I am at a
loss to explain how my faith should have
been confirmed afterwards by coming upon
a guillotine — an awful instrument in the
likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapi-
tated wooden figure under its blade — which
the custodian confessed to be a modern im-

AT PADUA. 259

provement placed there by Signer P .

Yet my credulity was so strengthened by
his candour, that I accepted without hesita-
tion the torture of the water-drop when we
came to it. The water- jar was as well pre-
served as if placed there but yesterday, and
the skeleton beneath it — found as we saw it
— was entire and perfect.

In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton — found
as we saw it — with its neck in the clutch of
the garrote, which was one of Eccelino's more
merciful punishments ; while in still another
cell the ferocity of the tyrant appeared in
the penalty inflicted upon the wretch whose
skeleton had been hanging for ages — as we
saw it — head downwards from the ceiling.

Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier
dungeon, stood a heavy oblong wooden box,
with two apertures near the top, peering
through which we found that we were look-
ing into the eyeless sockets of a skull.
Within this box Eccelino had immured the
victim we beheld there, and left him to
perish in view of the platters of food and
goblets of drink placed just beyond the
reach of his hands. The food we saw was
of course not the original food.

At last we came to the crowning horror of
Villa P , the supreme excess of Eccelino's

260 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

cruelty. The guide entered the cell before
us, and, as we gained the threshold, threw
the light of his taper vividly upon a block
that stood in the middle of the floor. Fixed
to the block by an immense spike driven
through from the back was the little slender
hand of a woman, which lay there just as it
had been sti-uck from the living arm, and
which, after the lapse of so many centuries,
was still as perfectly preserved as if it had
been embalmed. The sight had a most cruel
fascination ; and, while one of the horror-
seekers stood helplessly conjuring to his
vision that scene of unknown dread, — the
shrinking, shrieking woman dragged to the
block, the wild, shrill, horrible screech fol-
lowing the blow that drove in the spike, the
merciful swoon after the mutilation, — his
companion, with a sudden pallor, demanded
to be taken instantly away.

In their swift withdrawal, they only
glanced at a few detached instruments of
torture, — all original Eccelinos, but intended
for the infliction of minor and comparatively
unimportant torments, — and then they
passed from that place of fear.

in.
IN the evening we sat talking at the Caffe

AT PADUA. 261

Pedrocchi with an abbate, an acquaintance
of ours, who was a professor in the Uni-
versity of Padua. Pedrocchi 's is the great
caffe of Padua, a granite edifice of Egyptian
architecture, which is the mausoleum of the
proprietor's fortune. The pecuniary skeleton
at the feast, however, does not much trouble
the guests. They begin early in the evening
to gather into the elegant saloons of the
caffe, — somewhat too large for so small a
city as Padua, — and they sit there late in
the night over their cheerful cups and their
ices, with their newspapers and their talk.
Not so many ladies are to be seen as at the
caffe in Venice, for it is only in the greater
cities that they go much to these public
places. There are few students at Pe-
drocchi's, for they frequent the cheaper
caffe ; but you may nearly always find there
some professor of the University, and on the
evening of which I speak there were two
present besides our abbate. Our friend's
great passion was the English language,
which he understood too well to venture to
speak a great deal. He had been translat-
ing from that tongue into Italian certain
American poems, and our talk was of these
at first. Then we began to talk of distin-
guished American writers, of whom intelli-

262 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

gent Italians always know at least four,
in this succession, — Cooper, Mrs. Stowe,
Longfellow, and Irving. Mrs. Stowe's Ca-
panna di Zio Tom is, of course, univer-
sally read; and my friend had also read
n Fiorre di Maggio,—"The May-flower."
Of Longfellow, the ' ' E vangeline " is fami-
liar to Italians, through a translation of
the poem ; but our abbate knew all the
poet's works, and one of the other professors
present that evening had made such faithful
study of them as to have produced some
translations, rendering the original with re-
markable fidelity and spirit. I have before
me here this brochure, printed last year at
Padua, and containing versions of " En-
celadus," "Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life,"
"The Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of
the Desert in an Hour-Glass," " Twilight,"
"Daybreak," "The Quadroon Girl," and
" Torquemada," — pieces which give the Ital-
ians a fair notion of our poet's lyrical range,
and which bear witness to Professor Messa-
daglia's sympathetic and familiar knowledge
of his works. A young and gifted lady
of Parma, now unhappily no more, lately
published a translation of " The Golden
Legend ;" and Professor Messadaglia, in his
preface, mentions a version of another of

AT PADUA. 263

our poet's longer works, on which the trans-
lator of the " Evangeline" is now engaged.

At last, turning from literature, we spoke
with the gentle abbate of our day's adven-
tures, and eagerly related that of the Eccelino
prisons. To have seen them was the most
terrific pleasure of our lives.

" Eh !" said our friend," I believe you."

" We mean those under the Villa P ."

"Exactly."

There was a tone of politely suppressed
amusement in the abbate's voice ; and after
a moment's pause, in which we felt our awful
experience slipping and sliding away from us,
we ventured to say, " You don't mean that
those are not the veritable Eccelino prisons ?"

" Certainly they are nothing of the kind.
The Eccelino prisons were destroyed when
the Crusaders took Padua, with the excep-
tion of the tower, which the Venetian Re-
public converted into an observatory."

" But at least these prisons are on the
site of Eccelino 's castle?"

"Nothing of the sort. His castle in that
case would have been outside of the old city
walls."

" And those tortures and the prisons are
all "—

"Things got up for show. No doubt,

264 ITALIAN JOURNEYS.

Eccelino used such things, and many worse,

of which even the ingenuity of Signer P

cannot conceive. But he is an eccentric man,

loving the horrors of history, and what he can

do to realise them he has done in his prisons. "

"But the custodian — how could he lie so?"

Our friend shrugged his shoulders. ' ' Eh !

Easily. And perhaps he even believed what

he said."

The world began to assume an aspect
of bewildering ungenuineness, and there
seemed to be a treacherous quality of fiction
in the ground under our feet. Even the
play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale,
where we went to pass the rest of the
evening, appeared hollow and improbable.
We thought the hero something of a bore,
with his patience and goodness ; and as for
the heroine, pursued by the attentions of
the rich profligate, we doubted if she were
any better than she should be

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